A intimate account of the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter Lorena Hickok—a relationship that, over more than three decades, transformed both women's lives and empowered them to play significant roles in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.
...[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.
