Franklin and Eleanor

Synopsis
Hazel Rowley attempts to delve into the unconventional marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

My thoughts
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are two of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century and Rowley does a very good job describing their personalities and explaining the context of the times. However, she's somewhat less successful in capturing the dynamic of the marriage, which was the appeal of the book.

The book is subtitled "an extraordinary marriage," and it certainly was. Rowley has exhaustively researched the available correspondence between Franklin and Eleanor themselves and between each of them and their close friends, potential lovers, and employees (which are sometimes one and the same). It's clear that Franklin and Eleanor had a great deal of respect for each other, and each of them needed and depended upon the other. (At least to some degree. They were both fiercely independent and self-sufficient.) I felt like I only gained a superficial understanding of what made their unorthodox relationship work. This isn't really Rowley's fault; the only people who knew how the Roosevelt marriage worked were the Roosevelts themselves, and their relationship was so complicated and multi-faceted that even they probably weren't entirely sure what was going on all the time.

To say that the Roosevelts did not have a smooth marital relationship is a vast understatement. They were overshadowed at their own wedding in 1905 by Theodore Roosevelt - Eleanor's uncle, Franklin's distant cousin, and the president of the United States. From the beginning, they had to live under the scrutiny of Franklin's overbearing mother, who controlled the purse strings and lived next door. Franklin's affair with Eleanor's secretary, Lucy Mercer, devastated Eleanor. They remained married, but the character of the marriage changed. Then came Franklin's battle with and recovery from polio and his decision to seek public office.

This is actually where the dual biography loses steam. A portrait of a marriage is a difficult subject when the interests and everyday lives of the individuals in that marriage diverge, and Rowley's book in effect becomes two separate biographies somewhere around here. Rowley loses the thread that held the marriage together, that shows how Franklin and Eleanor worked together and how they regarded each other. The latter part of the biography is slightly weighted toward Eleanor because of the two she is easier to relate to. Franklin comes off as charming and brilliant, but he's also arrogant.

Bottom line
Find a good biography of one and then read a good biography of the other.

Fine print
Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, by Hazel Rowley
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.