...[a] poignant account of a love affair doomed by circumstance and conflicting needs. Combining exhaustive research with emotional nuance, Ms. Quinn dives deep to convey the differing characters of president and first lady ... Ms. Quinn offers a comprehensive, if sometimes painful, narrative of both women in their later years.
Quinn is the first to devote a full volume to the relationship ... Quinn has produced an intimate book, tender and wise. She is strangely silent on only one count: She offers no sense of what, if anything, FDR knew or whether it mattered ... With the war years, Quinn’s account resists her bold subtitle, which uneasily accommodates the two women’s diverging paths and fortunes.
[Quinn] is both circumspect and suggestive about the nature of their relationship ... This is a brisk, readable account of the intersection between these two women, but its subtitle is a misnomer. Eleanor was already shaped, as a writer and activist, when they met, and the period of Hick’s influence lasted only from 1932 to 1938. The book’s real value is as a parallel portrait of two unconventional women caught up in the maelstrom of 20th-century politics and world affairs.
Quinn is the first to have full access to the letters, and there could not have been a better writer to entrust with them ... The biography marvelously weaves the lives of these two women together, showing their fierce independence and yet continual dependence on each other. The book also reflects a refreshing change in cultural opinion, most likely one that will usher in books on other historical homosexual relationships just as well-researched and kind as Eleanor and Hick.
