“Desertion of the young and defenseless,” he wrote, “remained an ever-present theme.”Įleanor was educated at a private girls’ school located in one of the Vanderbilt mansions. Her first biographer, Joseph Lash, saw this experience as key to her future commitments. By age ten, the orphaned Eleanor was living with her grandmother. By the age of eight, her mother and brother had died of diphtheria, and her father, a dissolute alcoholic, died two years later by jumping out his apartment window. At the center of the nation’s ruling elite, she faced every obstacle by aligning with the poor and refugees, seeking just solutions with, and for, the exploited of the world.Įleanor’s hard-drinking father and self-involved mother left her under a nanny’s care, and French was her first language for this reason. Born on New York’s West 37th Street in 1884, Eleanor’s life was one of constant change. “I would have to become a good deal more companionable and more of an all-round person than I had ever been before.” And so she does. When her husband, Franklin, is struck suddenly by polio, she takes a hard look at their six children and the labor of building his future political career. The Eleanor Roosevelt of Jan Jarboe Russell’s bumpy yet engrossing book is a person who decides who she must be and then wills herself to get there. Eleanor in the Village: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Search for Freedom and Identity in New York’s Greenwich Village By Jan Jarboe Russell
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