Q: Describe the scene at Grandmother Hall's house.
A: Well, when Eleanor Roosevelt's mother dies, she goes to live with her Grandmother Hall. And her Grandmother Hall is in mourning. She's in widow's weeds. She's in her fifties, but appears very old. And she's exhausted from raising rather out-of-control children. Her favorite daughter, Anna, has died (Eleanor's mother), and she has living at home two other sons, Vallie and Eddie. And they are incredible sportsmen, incredible drinkers, out-of-control alcoholics. And then there are two aunts, Pussie and Maude. I think Pussie is also an out-of-control alcoholic. And everybody's taking various drugs (laudanum, mood boosters, mood elevators, mood depressants). And it's not clear what is really going on here, except that the uncles are clearly out of control. And Grandmother Hall really imagines that she can raise Eleanor and her two brothers differently than these children were raised. And if she is very strict and everything is very regimented and ordered and disciplined, that they will become the perfect children who her own children did not become.
In one way, it is this sense of order and also love that, I think, really saved Eleanor Roosevelt's life. And in her own writing, she's very warm about her grandmother, even though, if you look at contemporary accounts, they're accounts of horror at the Dickensian scene that Tivoli represents: bleak and drear and dark and unhappy. But Eleanor Roosevelt in her own writings is not very unhappy about Tivoli.
And then, by the time she is 14-15, things really do get worse, and her uncles are more and more out of control. At some point, locks appear on her door, three sets of locks, presumably to keep her uncle Vallie, who is an out-of-control alcoholic, out of her room, and to protect her from certain abuse. And at that point, there are several family conversations. And her Roosevelt relatives, especially her aunt Bye, who is her favorite aunt, suggests that she go to Allenswood and study with the fabulous Marie Souvestre, who she had studied with at [Les Rouches], a school in France for, you know, Europe's aristocracy and for North America's aristocracy. And that really becomes Eleanor Roosevelt's salvation: her years away at school.
Q: She does not look back on the years with her grandmother as unhappy. Why?
A: I think her Grandmother Hall gave her a great sense of family love, and reassurance. Her grandmother did love her, like her father, unconditionally. And despite the order and the discipline -- and home at certain hours and out at certain hours and reading at certain hours -- there was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn't censored. And she actually in later years writes articles about how books should never be censored for children, because she would take adult books and climb a cherry tree and stay in that cherry tree until dusk, and read these books. And if there was something she didn't understand, well, she didn't understand it. But it would enable her to live, again, a fantasy life in books, and how books were a great escape for her. And her Grandmother Hall provided her really with a quite wonderful education, and a freedom that, within the framework of Tivoli (which is a framework of discipline and order) is also a very encouraging and loving one.
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