"Family letters and recollections provide few glimpses
of Eleanor's childhood, yet they were obviously critical years.
In Eleanor's later portrayal of these years she emerges as a child
who was full of fears--of the dark, of dogs, horses, snakes, of
other children. She was 'afraid of being scolded, afraid that
other people would not like me.' She spoke of a sense of inferiority
that was almost overpowering coupled with an unquenchable craving
for praise and affection. She described her mother as the most
beautiful woman she ever knew but also as representing cold virtue,
severity, and disapproval, while her father embodied everything
that was warm and joyous in her childhood."
. . .
"In her autobiography, published in 1937, she was more
explicit about her feelings of being left out when her mother
was with the two little boys, Ellie and Hall. Her mother did not
consciously exclude her; she read to Eleanor and had Eleanor read
to her and recite her poems, and Eleanor was allowed to stay after
the boys had been sent off to bed. But what Eleanor emphasized
was standing in the door, 'very often with my finger in my mouth,'
and her mother bidding her 'Come in Granny,' with that voice and
look of kind indifference. Child psychologists had not yet discovered
the connection between the 'finger in the mouth' and the hunger
for affection."
from:
Joseph P. Lash. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship,
Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1971, pp. 28, 33.
"Anna did her best to reassure her children.
Every evening she would gather them around her for 'mother's hour,"
when she would read to them and play with them. 'My little brother
Ellie adored her, and was so good he never had to be reproved,'
Eleanor recalled. The baby Hall was content to sit quietly on
his mother's lap. Eleanor would sit on a footstool, apart from
the others. 'I felt a curious barrier between myself and these
three,' she wrote."
. . .
"Just before Eleanor's eighth birthday,
her mother entered the hospital to have surgery for some unknown
illness. Elliott wanted to travel north to be with his wife, but
he was asked to stay away. Anna did not want him to come. He never
saw her again. After her operation she contracted diphtheria,
and, at the age of twenty-nine, Anna Roosevelt died."
from:
Russell Freedman. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery.
New York: Clarion Books, 1993, p. 11, 12.
"After we were installed, my father came
to see me, and I remember going down into to the high-ceilinged,
dim library on the first floor of the house in West 37th Street.
He sat in a big chair. He was dressed all in black, looking very
sad. He held out his arms and gathered me to him. In a little
while he began to talk, to explain to me that my mother was gone,
that she had been all the world to him, and now he had only my
brothers and myself, that my brothers were very young and that
he and I must keep close together. Some day I would make a home
for him again, we would travel together and do many things which
he painted as interesting and pleasant, to be looked forward to
in the future.
"Somehow it was always he and I. I did
not understand whether my brothers were to be our children or
whether he felt that they would be going to a school and later
be independent.
"There started that day a feeling which
never left me, that he and I were very close and someday would
have a life of our own together."
from:
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Boston, MA: G.K.
Hall, 1984, pp. 9-10 [original copyright in 1937.]
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