Anna Eleanor Roosevelt grew up wealthy but lacked family security. Her father drank too much, used drugs, and often disappeared for days at a time. Her mother tried to keep the family together, but after Eleanor's father was admitted to a sanitarium, her mother raised the family on her own. Young Eleanor missed her father and felt she could never measure up to her mother’s expectations. Just before Eleanor’s eighth birthday, her mother contracted diphtheria and died. Eleanor was sent to live with her strict maternal grandmother, Mary Hall. Her father visited and wrote Eleanor sporadically, but when she was ten, he too died, leaving her an orphan. Eleanor was regarded as an “ugly duckling” by herself and others. When, at age fourteen she was asked to dance at a formal dance by her cousin, sixteen-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she was eternally grateful. At fourteen Eleanor was sent to boarding school in Europe. Eleanor loved her school and wanted to stay for a fourth year, but her grandmother made her return “home” to make her debut into New York society. At age nineteen Eleanor became secretly engaged to a handsome Harvard student: her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Eleanor married Franklin on St. Patrick’s Day 1905 with her uncle Ted – President Theodore Roosevelt – standing in for her father to give the bride away. The couple had six children, one of whom died in infancy. However, their marriage was not without problems. Eleanor supported her husband in his political career, yet also followed her own convictions. Russell Freedman’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt includes numerous photographs and primary source documents giving the reader a personal look into the life of a truly amazing woman.
