She is remembered for developing schizophrenia as a young woman, which led to a romantic obsession with a British military officer who rejected her.

Adèle's family worried for her well-being and tried to track her whereabouts by letters: Contemporary reports, given by those who may have had some contact with Adèle or who knew her personally, came from her lawyers Mr. Motton and Mr. Lenoir, her neighbors, the local sheriff, and the owner of a bookstore from whom she purchased writing supplies (Guille 132).

It is from the document provided by the families with whom Adèle lived, the Saunders and the Mottons, that we have the greatest detail concerning her life during this three-year period.

Mrs. Saunders' faithful correspondence with François-Victor in particular, permitted the Hugo family to be kept abreast of Adèle's health, activities and visitors.

An account of Adèle's wretched situation in Barbados was given by Cathonoy, the head of the Catholic mission in Trinidad, in a letter dated 8 September 1885.

He relates an incident where he met a Barbadian woman of African descent, named Madame Céline Alvarez Baa, who requested that a mass be said for Victor Hugo after news of the author's death.

[3] An account similar to Cathonoy's was given in an anonymous letter to the editor published by the New-York Tribune on 27 May 1885.

[7] She stopped keeping a diary by the time she landed in Barbados due to her mental deterioration.

Also her life and obsession with Pinson was put in a book titled Adèle Hugo: La Misérable by Leslie Smith Dow.

Mark Bostridge's book, published by Bloomsbury in 2024, explores his own obsession with Adèle Hugo in a biography-cum-memoir, described by the London Sunday Times as "gloriously rich and capacious".