Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1

ELEANOR SAILED FOR ENGLAND ACCOMPANIED BY HER Aunt Tissie—Elizabeth Livingston Hall—who with her husband, Stanley Mortimer, a famous art-collector and portrait-painter, had lived in England for many years. Close to Eleanor’s parents, they were associated with the fox-hunting Meadow Brook set. During the 1890s, the Mortimers built a sixty-room English Tudor manor on their 101-acre estate in Roslyn, Long Island—with Gothic gables, a bright Spanish tiled roof, imported stained-glass windows for the library, and Delia Robbias in the stable.

During her five years at Tivoli, Eleanor had not seen the Mortimers often, but they became close while she was at Allenswood. Aunt Tissie (as well as Mademoiselle Souvestre) introduced ER to new experiences, new places, new people: Claridge’s Hotel in London, where ER would often stay in the future; the Passion Play at Oberammergau; Saint-Moritz; the Austrian Tyrol, which ER always considered “one of the loveliest places in the world.” Tissie was “always kindness itself to me,” recalled ER. She was “very beautiful,” and “felt more at home in Europe and in England than she did in the United States…. She had many friends in that little London coterie known as ‘The Souls.’ She was one of the people that the word ‘exquisite’ describes best.” Eleanor’s three years at Allenswood would be much enhanced by her visits and travels with her Aunt Tissie. Located in Wimbledon Park, minutes from central London by train, Allenswood was a small school dedicated to offering the daughters of Europe’s liberal aristocracy, and America’s leadership class, a wide-ranging education that emphasized responsibility in society and personal independence, within or without marriage.

Allenswood was not an ordinary finishing school for the fin de Stècle smart set but, rather, a collegiate environment that took the education of women seriously, at a time when they were denied access to the great halls of learning. Feminist and progressive, Allenswood and its predecessor, Les Ruches, were responsible for the education of several generations of outstanding and notable women.

Both schools had been founded by Marie Souvestre, daughter of the esteemed French philosopher and novelist Emile Souvestre. Well connected and highly regarded throughout liberal intellectual circles, she was an integral part of that community of radical thinkers associated with John Morley, Joseph Chamberlain, Leslie Stephen, and Jane Maria Grant (Lady Strachey). Of this circle, only Leslie Stephen failed to send his daughters, Vanessa (Bell) and Virginia (Woolf), to her school. Such affluent and privileged Americans as railroad heiresses Natalie Barney and her sister Laura attended Les Ruches, and Henry James urged his brother William to send his daughter to Allenswood.

Lady Strachey spent considerable time with Marie Souvestre in Italy during the winter of 1870–71, after she had to close Les Ruches when the Germans invaded Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, and they remained personally close until Souvestre’s death in 1905. Lady Strachey sent her older daughters, Elinor and Dorothy, to Les Ruches and her younger daughters, Joan Pernel and Marjorie, to Allenswood. Indeed, Lady Strachey was largely responsible for Marie Souvestre’s ability to transfer her school to England, and then saw to it that the children in her extended Anglo-Indian family circle, including the Ritchies, Thackerays, Patties, and Tennysons, all went there.

The Stracheys went on to distinguish themselves in many ways that showed the influence of Marie Souvestre. Dorothy Strachey attended Les Ruches, taught Shakespeare at Allenswood, married a French painter named Simon Bussy, engaged in heroic underground work against the fascists during World War II, and became noted as the translator of her great friend André Gide. She also wrote Olivia, an ardent novel that remains to date the only portrait of Marie Souvestre. Joan Pernel Strachey became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. Philippa Strachey, profoundly affected by the feminist ideas of Marie Souvestre, became secretary to the London National Society for Women’s Service, from 1914 to 1951. Marjorie Strachey, a teacher and writer whose novel about Bloomsbury, The Counterfeits, created quite a stir, was never given proper credit for the work she co-authored with her brother Lytton.

The Strachey sons were also embraced by Marie Souvestre. Frequent dinners, and Christmas holidays brought the entire family to Allenswood for occasions of stirring conviviality. Over the years, Lytton Strachey especially was drawn by Mademoiselle Souvestre’s magnetism. According to his biographer Michael Holroyd, “In the grace, the quick and witty brilliance of his literary style can be seen some reflection of her own peculiar charm and mental agility.” With her, “Lytton for the first time became …aware …that there existed …an entirely different environment, far more congenial to his nature.” In fact, Marie Souvestre’s “spirit and personality permeated the whole family.” Her magnificent intensity “recharged the core” of their “literary enthralment,” as it marked forever the course of the passionately committed lives of her students.

Marie Souvestre’s international school thrived at the height of and in the heart of patriarchal Victorian society, in a time when education was, in more mundane circles, considered dangerous to a woman’s mental health, the pathway to madness and sterility. Independent and creative education for women was also thought to be dangerous to society. It would lead to votes for women, public activity, socialism, agnosticism, utopianism, opposition to war, the dissolution of empire. It was positively subversive. Marie Souvestre entertained it all. Her ideas were dangerous.

A feminist of bold conviction, she disdained the patriarchal mind—the withering looks and cruel criticisms of male disapproval—which devoured with such ease the spirits of young women struggling to learn and to grow. Like Virginia Woolf, she condemned the giant cucumbers in the garden that spread themselves all over the roses, fed off their strength, and choked them to death. She believed that only by developing an independent vision, and by developing the means to fight and defend that vision, could young women of purpose survive.

If her methods seemed harsh to some of her students, who stood before her with palpitating, fearful hearts, clammy hands, and silent, dry throats, others thrilled to her challenge and were beckoned by her purpose. They understood her message: To achieve and to survive in the realms ordinarily denied them, women had to learn to argue, to resist, and to be forceful themselves.

Beatrice Webb, the British Fabian theorist, considered her a “remarkable woman,” whose intellectual rigor helped to forge the future. Her students “felt that every idea is brought under a sort of hammering logic, and broken into pieces unless it be of very sound metal.”

A passionate humanist committed to social justice, Marie Souvestre inspired young women to think about leadership, to think for themselves, and above all to think about a nobler, more decent future. To her mind, nothing was dull, no subject irrelevant. Everything creative and imaginative was encouraged. She would not, however, abide dull thoughts, dull thinkers, lazy or boorish girls who wasted their talents and abused their charms.

Her brilliant speech darted here and there with the agility and grace of a hummingbird. Sharp and pointed, it would sometimes transfix a victim cruelly. No one was safe, and if one laughed with her, one was liable the next minute to be pierced oneself with a shaft of irony. But she tossed her epigrams with such evident enjoyment, that if one had the smallest sense of fun, one enjoyed them too…. But her talk was not all epigrams. One felt it informed by that infectious ardor, that enlivening zest, which were the secret of her success as a schoolmistress. There was nothing into which she could not infuse them. Every subject, however dull it had seemed in the hands of others, became animated in hers…. The dullest of her girls were stirred into some sort of life in her presence; to the intelligent, she communicated a Promethean fire which warmed and coloured their whole lives. To sit at table at her right hand was an education itself.

Though Eleanor was exposed to several gifted and learned teachers at Allenswood, Marie Souvestre was “far and away the most impressive and fascinating person.” Physically she was “short and rather stout, and had snow-white hair. Her head was beautiful, with clear-cut, strong features, a very strong face and broad forehead.” Her hair fell back in “natural waves to a twist at the back of her head. Her eyes looked through you, and she always knew more than she was told.” For Eleanor, Allenswood was Marie Souvestre. And the best part of Allenswood were the moments spent informally in her company.

Like her Aunt Bye, ER became one of Marie Souvestre’s intimate favorites. Perhaps it was, as Eleanor thought, because of Mademoiselle Souvestre’s romance with America and Americans; or perhaps it was her keen ability to sense Eleanor’s specialness. Whatever the reason, there was no doubt that, from her first week at Allenswood, she joined the innermost ring of Marie Souvestre’s personal orbit. It was a place of unique privileges, and required special obligations. Eleanor Roosevelt delighted in every one.

Entirely bilingual, Eleanor was well prepared for the French-speaking school. At an advantage for the first time in her life, she thoroughly impressed her English schoolmates. One classmate, Helen Gilford, described Eleanor’s first day during an interview with the London Daily Mail in 1942, when ER visited England: “I remember the day she arrived at the school, she was so very much more grown up than we were, and at her first meal, when we hardly dared open our mouths, she sat opposite Mlle. Souvestre, chatting away in French….”

At Allenswood, ER became confident in her abilities, and her personality flourished. A new maturity was reflected in her appearance. It was not just that she finally stood straighter. Now she claimed her full six-foot height, and walked tall with easy grace and pride. Mademoiselle Souvestre disliked Eleanor’s hand-me-down and unflattering clothes, and told her so. She encouraged Eleanor to use her allowance to have a long, really glamorous deep-red dress made by a Paris couturier. ER wore that dress with great pleasure every Sunday, and regularly for parties and school dances. No dress would ever satisfy her more. The tallest girl in her class, she was no longer gawky or ill-clad. And on a daily basis she looked very smart in the school’s dapper uniform of long dark skirts, high-collared and occasionally ruffled shirts, striped ties, blazers, and boaters.

Her usual place at dinner beside Mademoiselle Souvestre had several advantages, among them the chance to share special dishes prepared for the headmistress and her party, and the chance to share in the exciting conversation that sparkled about her. There was an urgency to appear to know more than she in fact did, which she achieved by listening keenly to other people’s clever words, and appropriating them. But she lived in dread of being discovered, and continually made it her business to know more.

Eleanor had never before experienced female authority as a freeing rather than a constraining force. At Allenswood she was finally given permission to be herself, to act in behalf of her own needs and wants. Unlike her mother and her grandmother, Marie Souvestre encouraged direct inquiry, admired a free-ranging probing intelligence. Mannerly obedience, form without substance, mindless docility meant little, but rigorous thought was immediately rewarded, which meant that Eleanor was able to shine, to be noticed and admired. She was also given the opportunity to explore and express her own feelings. She was even allowed to cry in public, and she felt secure enough to have her very first temper tantrum. That was the greatest gift Marie Souvestre gave to Eleanor Roosevelt, the chance really to know herself—and her deepest emotions.

Physically, Eleanor was invigorated. Her chronic colds and coughs evaporated. Her frequent headaches disappeared. She began to sleep well, eat regularly with good appetite, and feel robust. Despite the cold damp English climate, ER wanted “to bear witness to the fact that I never spent healthier years. I cannot remember being ill for a day.”

She played games and danced, enjoyed sports and competition. “One of the proudest moments of my life,” she wrote, was the day she “made the first team” in field hockey. “I liked playing with a team and winning their approbation. It was a rough enough game, with many hard knocks.” When ER made the first team and was cheered, she understood for the first time pure joy measured by personal success.

Eleanor Roosevelt was held in high esteem at Allenswood. Her presence and her opinions were sought after. She became, in fact, almost immediately the school’s primary leader. Above all, she quickly created a circle of intimate friends who were among the brightest and boldest in her class, and who were acknowledged as Mademoiselle Souvestre’s favorites.

Carola de Passavant, “a beautiful girl with a lovely character and real capacity,” was ER’s special friend and occasional roommate. Because she was from Germany, Carola was shunned by many of the English girls, but ER quickly reached out to her. She was also close to Avice Horn, sent home from Australia to be properly educated; Leonie and her sister Helen Gilford, “an extraordinarily brilliant child” whose “spectacles seemed bigger than she was,” and who subsequently headed another school on Allenswood principles; Hilda Burkinshaw (“Burky”), sent home from India at the age of five, seemingly a permanent scholar at Allenswood; and Marjorie Bennett, always called Bennett, ER’s first roommate, “a very shy, gentle girl” who remained ER’s friend until her death.

Bennett first explained Allenswood’s many rules to Eleanor, some of which she considered absurd. That only three baths a week were allowed, and none longer than ten minutes, positively appalled the daily-bathing American. The rule that required one to confess upon entering the dining room if one had used an English word at any time that day seemed “ridiculous” to Eleanor. Other rules struck her as capricious, the punishments excessive. Bed-stripping, or having the contents of one’s bureau drawers and closets dumped on one’s bed when disorderly, seemed rude. Whether Eleanor herself suffered such punishments is uncertain, but she was protective of others who did, particularly her best friend during her first year, “Jane,” who became the subject of Eleanor’s first demonstration of anguish and temper.

ER considered the girl she referred to anonymously as “Jane” “fascinating …brilliant and a real personality.” She “had the most violent temper I have almost ever seen, and I doubt if anyone ever tried to discipline her, but she had a fine mind and a very warm heart.” Jane and ER studied history with Marie Souvestre. “There were perhaps eight other girls in our class, but as far as I was concerned there was no one but Jane. This impression of mine was helped considerably by the fact that Mlle Souvestre seemed to feel there were only two members of her class—Jane and myself.”

The daughter of great landed wealth in Texas and Ireland, Jane, like ER, was selected by Marie Souvestre for special consideration: evenings of poetry reading in her library; classes in which she was singled out for attention and praised for her thoughtful essays. Because Jane was “insubordinate” in the regular German class, Mademoiselle Souvestre arranged for her and ER (called “Totty” by all at Allenswood) to study German privately together. Far more obedient, Eleanor was “considered a good influence for Jane.” Their private tutorial worked well until Jane threw an ink bottle at the German teacher.

Eleanor was furious when she learned that Jane was to be expelled. She appealed to Mademoiselle Souvestre. She understood that the offense was “unpardonable,” but considered the punishment extreme, unnecessary, and horrid. She cried and shouted, cajoled and pleaded, wept bitterly and at length. But Mademoiselle Souvestre was adamant. “I was heartbroken,” ER wrote in 1937. She had been summarily torn away from yet another passionate and undisciplined person to whom she had given her affections. For “many years” they corresponded, but, ER wrote, “after a time we lost track of each other…. Her glamour however is still with me, so that I would give much to see her walk into my room today.”

Although firm in her refusal to reconsider the expulsion, Marie Souvestre honored ER’s passionate attempt to protect her friend. She never said, as Eleanor’s grandmother had, If you have to cry, cry alone. Friendship, independence, spirited and forthright behavior were encouraged. During ER’s first year at Allenswood, Marie Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall:

All that you said when she came here of the purity of her heart, the nobleness of her thought has been verified by her conduct among people who were at first perfect strangers to her…. I often found that she influenced others in the right direction. She is full of sympathy for all those who live with her and shows an intelligent interest in everything she comes in contact with.

As a pupil she is very satisfactory, but even that is of small account when you compare it with the perfect quality of her soul.

Throughout her three years at Allenswood, ER’s scholarship ranged from good to excellent. Judging from her notebooks, however, she worked haphazardly on those subjects not taught by Marie Souvestre. Indeed, some of her notebooks are almost blank, except for a few scattered notes. In algebra, her grades were consistently “very good”; at the piano she was an “excellent worker”; on the violin she “made very rapid progress” and was “very good indeed.” At painting she consistently “improved, takes pains.” But Eleanor’s real strengths involved language and literature.

Her teachers were not all immediately enthusiastic about her work. At first Dorothy Strachey seemed rather grudging: “Intelligent as far as can be seen in the few lessons she has had”; “spelling needs improving.” But over the years she warmed to Eleanor’s efforts: “Very good. Her progress has been very marked this term.” Allenswood’s Italian teacher, and second in command, Mademoiselle Samaia, was very impressed with Eleanor’s abilities: “She works with zeal and great intelligence.” “She speaks and writes Italian with ease.” In French and German her work was consistently “excellent.” In general, Marie Souvestre noted at the end of her first year: “Excellent. She is the most amiable girl I have ever met; she is nice to everybody, very eager to learn and highly interested in all her work.”

However diligently Eleanor studied, or seemed to, she was really only involved with Marie Souvestre. She hardly remembered or considered her other teachers, except for Mademoiselle Samaia: “a very tiny and dynamic little woman who adored Mlle Souvestre and waited on her hand and foot, ran all the business end of the school, and gave our Italian lessons.” ER wrote that many students worked diligently to get into her good graces, but in order to do that “you had to show practical qualities.” Since ER considered herself “a dreamer,” she assumed she never entered her good graces. It is clear she did not try very hard or care very much. In any case her time was fully occupied.

Classes were compulsory, and every hour was to be accounted for. There were “hours for practice, time for preparation—no idle moments were left to anyone.” Exercise was also compulsory. A serious walk about the common after breakfast, in all weather—even when “the fog rose from the ground and penetrated the very marrow of your bones—but still we walked!” Although Mademoiselle Souvestre hated sports and could never understand “how girls could make such sights of themselves for a game of hockey,” she required two hours of exercise after lunch every day. Then there was a four o’clock snack: “big slices of bread about half an inch thick, sometimes spread with raspberry jam, more often with plain butter.” Then a study hour; then fifteen minutes in which to change for dinner.

Dinner at Allenswood was a formal affair. But in the evenings, “we worked again.” Occasionally, however, “we were allowed to go down to the gym and dance.” One afternoon a week was set aside for supervised mending, and there were occasional parties and outings. But for Eleanor the high points, the “red letter days,” were those occasions when Mademoiselle Souvestre invited ER and her friends to her study in the evening to read and talk.

Mademoiselle Souvestre’s library, where she also held her classes, was a “very charming and comfortable room lined with books and filled with flowers.” It looked out over “a wide expanse of lawn, where really beautiful trees gave shade in summer, and formed good perches for the rooks and crows in winter.” Filled with artworks—including the nudes of Puvis de Chavannes, which initially startled several of her students—Mademoiselle Souvestre’s library was the site of ER’s most splendid hours.

On most occasions, Mademoiselle Souvestre read aloud. ER recalled that she “had a great gift for reading aloud and she read to us, always in French, poems, plays or stories.” Her voice was “like Cordelia’s,” pitched “soft, gentle, and low.” She might read a favorite poem two or three times and then “demanded that we recite them to her in turn.” For ER that was a pleasure, since her memory was well trained. But “others suffered to such an extent” that they froze, trembled, and “could hardly speak.”

On other occasions, Mademoiselle Souvestre invited her favorite students to her study to proffer honors, or impart her views—messages she considered essential for this group of daughters of the leadership classes. She asked probing questions, exacted precise and thoughtful commentary, and evoked the best from those young women she judged special.

Mademoiselle Souvestre’s library was the vital center for all the students of Allenswood. Every evening, they assembled there before going to bed. Mail was distributed, the roll was called, announcements were made. Then the students “passed before Mlle Souvestre and wished her good night.” She had a word for each student, to encourage or to chastise. She either kissed you good night, or took your hand. And, according to ER, her judgments were generally correct. “She had an eagle eye which penetrated right through to your backbone and she took in everything about you.”

Marie Souvestre’s legacy to her students was her own power—her clarity of vision, her personal vigor, and her deep learning. She demanded that her students take themselves seriously. She was often impatient, and she could be cruel. But she reserved her cruelty for students who failed to think, to apply their own understanding, convictions, and ideals to her lessons. A paper without reflection or independent thought might be torn apart in public.

ER excelled at writing papers. We “were expected to do a good deal of independent reading and research …and I labored hard over those papers.” When she handed in slipshod work, it never went unnoticed. If criticized, she worked harder—rewrote, reconsidered, reflected more deeply. Eleanor enjoyed the process, and her work was generally acclaimed. Some of the others did not fare so well. Workaday efforts enraged Mademoiselle Souvestre. ER noted, “I have seen her take a girl’s paper and tear it in half in her disgust and anger at poor or shoddy work.”

Mademoiselle Souvestre’s explosive moods did not trouble Eleanor, whose years at Allenswood were entirely fearless: “For the first time in all my life all my fears left me.” However, Mademoiselle Souvestre’s displeasure was a hideous ordeal for many—not only its specific victims, but all who were stifled by her dramatic displays. ER’s cousin Corinne Robinson, whose first term at Allenswood coincided with Eleanor’s last, was horrified by her temper. She wrote her mother: “The classes with Mlle Souvestre are very interesting, but sometimes she gets terribly mad, and then I do pity the poor girl she is mad with. She pushes her round and screams and yells…. I like her much better when not at lessons….”

Reading through ER’s notebooks, one is surprised at how classical and traditional her studies were, though under the direction of one of the most liberal academic women in all of Europe. With emphasis on high culture, literature, and the arts, scarcely a class hour seems to have been devoted to economics, science, or that study of humanity and society that we now call the natural and social sciences then emerging in England and the United States. History, which Eleanor studied with Marie Souvestre, was essentially literary and cultural history, and the celebration of heroes.

Heroines were few. There is one page in Eleanor’s notebook on a minor female saint, Sainte Eulalie, a French virgin who was martyred at the age of twelve. But the only important deviation from the celebration of classic male texts was the inclusion of Christine de Pisan’s critical analysis of the utterly misogynist Roman de la Rose. Since Christine de Pisan, the great fifteenth-century champion of education for women, was virtually lost in the several student generations between ER’s schooldays and the 1970s, her appearance at Allenswood is worth noting. Married at fifteen, widowed at twenty-five, the mother of three, Christine de Pisan earned her living by her pen. Europe’s first “bluestocking,” she was called the first woman “who was a man of letters.” As a poet and an essayist, she was honored by her contemporaries for her brilliance and her strength of conviction. With a small number of male allies, she created an order for the defense of women, called the Court Amoureuse, inaugurated on Saint Valentine’s Day 1400 to honor women and to pursue poetry. Her essays, “The City of Women” and the “Book of Three Virtues,” described how a perfect lady ought to behave under every circumstance, and many of her teachings on the subject were timeless.

Despite the lack of classroom time devoted to the subject, politics, the controversies that divided Europe on the eve of the twentieth century, were discussed with passion in Marie Souvestre’s informal library sessions. She was a Dreyfusard, and condemned anti-Semitism. She was opposed to the Boer War, then raging in South Africa. Although the English girls were free to celebrate their victories, she would sit in her library with the girls from North and South America, Sweden, Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France and question the implications of empire, the edicts of colonialism. Her heretical ideas startled many of her listeners, but they were free to reject them. She encouraged all of the girls to become politically engaged.

Marie Souvestre expected to be challenged, and she believed in controversy, the fact of it as well as the exercise of it. She selected her favorites on the basis of their ability to interest and engage her. For three years ER was her favorite of favorites. When her cousin Corinne entered Allenswood, she noted that ER was Mademoiselle Souvestre’s “supreme favorite and what was remarkable was that she had made no enemies through this favoritism.”

Eleanor was selected to sit beside her at dinner, and to travel with her during several holidays. In her memoirs, ER described her travels with Marie Souvestre. During her first Christmas holiday, they went to Paris together. One Easter, they journeyed to Marseilles, then down the Mediterranean coast, and spent time in Pisa and Florence. During another Christmas holiday, they visited Rome. Mademoiselle Souvestre introduced her to local cuisine, vin du pays, variety, experiment, adventure. She was an impulsive traveler who dashed off the train spontaneously to visit a friend and walk on the beach in the moonlight.

At Alassio, “Mlle Souvestre was galvanized into action”: We are going to get off, she announced. “I was aghast, for my grandmother, who was far from Mlle Souvestre’s seventy years …would never have thought of changing plans once she was on the train.”

But Mademoiselle Souvestre’s friend Mrs. Humphry Ward* lived there, and, she explained, “the Mediterranean is a very lovely blue at night and the sky with the stars coming out is nice to watch from the beach.” ER was “thrilled” by her spontaneity. Marie Souvestre taught ER “how to enjoy traveling. She liked to be comfortable, she enjoyed good food…. She always ate native dishes and drank native wines. I think she felt that it was just as important to enjoy good Italian food as it was to enjoy good Italian art, and it all served to make you a citizen of the world, at home wherever you might go….” ER considered her travels with Marie Souvestre “one of the most momentous things that happened in my education.”

ER was given all the responsibilities for arrangements, packing and unpacking, planning the train schedules, and buying the tickets. Her travels with Marie Souvestre changed her life. “Never again would I be the rigid little person I had been theretofore.” In Florence and Paris, she toured alone with her Baedeker. Later she wrote: “I really marvel now at myself—confidence and independence, for I was totally without fear in this new phase of my life.” But this phase was to come to an abrupt end the day her Tivoli neighbors, the Thomas Newbold family, saw her sightseeing alone, and wrote home to her grandmother that she “was unchaperoned in Paris!”

This letter caused Grandmother Hall to demand Eleanor’s return home after her second year. Marie Souvestre was displeased by Mrs. Hall’s decision, but if she made any effort to change her mind the letter is lost. As Eleanor prepared to leave, Mademoiselle Souvestre wrote her grandmother: “Eleanor has had the most admirable influence on the school and gained the affection of many and the respect of all. To me personally I feel I lose a dear friend in her.”

Eleanor hated to leave, but could not refuse her grandmother’s orders. The most devastating experience of that summer back home was an encounter with her Aunt Pussie, whose string of unsuccessful love affairs had made her moody and unpredictable. One day, presumably troubled by yet another romantic disaster of her own, she turned on her niece and blurted that Eleanor “would probably never have the beaux that the rest of the women in the family had had, because I was the ugly duckling.” Quite out of control, she then disclosed “the painful and distressing facts about my father’s last years.” If Eleanor tended to dismiss her aunt’s outburst as yet another instance of her overwrought behavior, when she asked her godmother, Cousin Susie Parish, and her grandmother for the truth, they offered no comfort. And she understood for the first time the mysteries of her childhood. It was a brutal summer. She was inconsolable for weeks, and “wanted just one thing, to get back to England to school and more traveling in Europe.” She was in such a state that she was able to convince her grandmother that it would indeed be best for her to return to Allenswood for one more year.

In 1901, her Aunt Tissie was not available to accompany her. Since her grandmother insisted that she be fully chaperoned, and had only reluctantly agreed to her return “after much begging and insistence,” Eleanor went to New York City and hired an Episcopalian deaconess as a shipboard companion. “It was one of the funniest and craziest things I ever did.” “She looked respectable enough…, but I never saw her until the day we landed.”

Her last year at Allenswood was a heady, happy time—incomparable, unique. ER was now seventeen, Marie Souvestre seventy. Eleanor was the chosen daughter, the preferred companion. That Christmas, Mademoiselle Souvestre took ER and Burky to Rome, where, at midnight mass at Saint Peter’s, ER concluded, with considerable relief, that “Mlle Souvestre was not an atheist at heart for she was as much moved as we were by the music and the lights!” At Easter, she traveled alone with Mademoiselle Souvestre to France, Belgium, and Germany.

It was their last trip together, and Marie Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall: “It is impossible to wish for oneself a more delightful companion in travelling. She is never tired, never out of sorts, never without a keen interest in all that she sees; the more I know her, the more I see what a helpful and devoted grandchild she will be to you. Ah! to me! What a blank her going away must leave in my life!”

It would leave an empty space in Eleanor’s life as well: Corinne Robinson wrote in her unpublished memoirs that when she herself arrived at Allenswood ER was “everything.” “She was beloved by everybody. Saturdays we were allowed a sortie into Putney which had stores where you could buy books, flowers. Young girls have crushes and you bought violets or a book and left them in the room of the girl you were idolizing. Eleanor’s room every Saturday would be full of flowers because she was so admired.”

In 1933, Dorothy Strachey Bussy wrote Olivia, a roman à clef of Les Ruches and Allenswood. Like Eleanor, the character of Laura is the model of “every kind of excellence.” Her devoirs, or papers, “were always the best; they used to be read aloud as examples of what a devoir might be, ought to be.” The narrator, entirely in love with Mademoiselle Julie (the novel’s Marie Souvestre), planned to hate Laura, to be jealous of this “altogether too perfect” paragon. But when they meet:

we were both shy and awkward, but Laura more awkward than I, and I soon realized that, instead of feeling herself superior, on the contrary, she was curiously conscious of her deficiencies. She knew that, in spite of her efforts, she was badly dressed and clumsy…. that she had nothing, in fact, to atone for her intellectual superiority, while at the same time she had an uneasy feeling that that superiority ought somehow to be atoned for. Not that this want of confidence in her powers of attraction made her self-conscious. No, I have never seen anyone devote herself to others with such manifest gladness. And yet, with all her altruism, one could never think of her as self-sacrificing. She never did sacrifice herself…. Her face was one of the most radiant I have ever seen; grave sometimes, but never moody, never despondent. Her clear, untroubled eyes looked at one with such frank, joyful affection that for the moment she banished moodiness and despondency…. She was an invigorating companion….

Unlike Laura, Olivia is devastated by her ardent longing for Mademoiselle Julie. One day she asks Laura, “do you love her?”

“Oh,” said Laura, “you know I do. She has been the best part of my life…. She has opened my eyes to all I like best in the world, showered me with innumerable treasures.”

“And tell me this, Laura. Does your heart beat when you go into the room where she is? Does it stand still when you touch her hand? Does your voice dry up in your throat when you speak to her? Do you hardly dare raise your eyes to look at her, and yet not succeed in turning them away?”

“No,” said Laura. “None of that.”

“What then?” I insisted.

“Why,” said Laura, looking at me with her clear, untroubled eyes, which had a kind of wonder and a kind of recoil in them: “there’s nothing else. I just love her.”

Writing during her sixty-eighth year, Dorothy Strachey Bussy sought to describe the awakening of the incomparable sensations aroused in her when she was sixteen and first heard Marie Souvestre read from Racine’s Andromaque:

I looked at her for the first time as I listened. I don’t know which I did more thirstily—looked or listened. It suddenly dawned upon me that this was beauty—great beauty …physical beauty. I was never blind to it again…. And then there were the sonorous vowels, the majestic periods, the tremendous names sweep on; one is borne upon a tide of music and greatness…. One follows breathlessly …leaving at the end a child’s soul shaken and exhausted.

As for her lessons, Olivia now approached them “with a renovated ardor.” Every page of every lesson now held a new mystery, “some passionate secret which must be mined or I should die! Words! How astonishing they were….”

Every moment in the company of Mademoiselle Julie is now filled with a new level of excitement, of enchantment. “Had I never looked at a face before?” Every detail, every smile, or scowl is devoured. She gives way to languor. Her longing for a moment alone with Mademoiselle Julie became unbearable. She sits for hours plunged in gloom, her head on the table, “in a kind of coma.” She becomes “a mass of physical sensations which bewildered me, which made me feel positively sick. My heart beat violently, my breath came fast…. At the opening of every door, at the sound of the most casual footstep, my solar plexus shot the wildest stabs through every portion of my body….”

Written fifteen years earlier, Olivia was published anonymously in London by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1948. It became an immediate best-seller and went into twenty printings within weeks. Dedicating her book “To the beloved memory of V.W.,” Bussy (then over eighty) wrote in the introduction: “I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, …without regard for other people’s feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.”

Dorothy Strachey Bussy explained that her effort to recapture the feelings of that year when she was sixteen had been one of the most difficult tasks of her life. She had first of all to confront a variety of known and unknown enemies. It had been necessary to overthrow “the psychologists, the psychoanalysts, the Prousts and the Freuds”—all of whom had lain “in ambush” to “poison the sources of emotion,” “to give it its name,” and to apply their “poisonous antidotes” to the romantic realities of life. “Love has always been the chief business of my life,” she wrote, “and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others.” But now she had “felt the urgency of confession,” the need to stand up to and assail those elements of her culture that had caused her to hide, to experience her first passion in dread and pain. “Really no one had ever heard of such a thing, except as a joke. Yes, people used to make joking allusions to ‘school-girl crushes.’ But I knew well enough that my ‘crush’ was not a joke. And yet I had an uneasy feeling that, if not a joke, it was something to be ashamed of, something to hide desperately.”

Decades of biographical denial have attempted to persuade us that Eleanor Roosevelt knew nothing of “the meaning,” the true meaning of Olivia. But Olivia is not a coded or esoteric book. It is a very simple love story of young, uncontrollable romance. A lesbian romance. The passions that devastated Olivia did not devastate Eleanor. But she understood the book, and she was grateful to receive it.*

Her classmate Marjorie Bennett Vaughn sent her the book, with the details of its publication. “I have ordered a little book to be sent to you which I think may be of interest….” “Leonie [Gifford] and I have both liked it very much, and thought you might. It is quite short and so would not take up much of your valuable time.”

Bennett’s next letter thanks ER for her “nice little note.” “I am glad you liked Olivia. It seemed to take me back so far!…”

Eleanor Roosevelt was very specific about her own feelings toward Marie Souvestre. She was her teacher, the most important person in her life after her father. She was the first woman who encouraged Eleanor to explore her heart, discover and develop her capacities. Increasingly, “day by day I found myself more interested in her. This grew into a warm affection that lasted until her death.”

When Eleanor was faced with the ordeal of having to leave Allenswood at eighteen in order to make her debut into society, she was bereft. “Mlle Souvestre had become one of the people whom I cared most for in the world, and the long separation seemed hard to bear. I would have given a good deal to have spent another year on my education.” But when Eleanor left Allenswood she “felt quite sure” she would return before long, to teach. She never considered not seeing Marie Souvestre again. “She wrote me lovely letters, which I still cherish,” ER wrote in 1960.

Many of these letters, like so many others of key importance to ER, have disappeared. Yet the ones that survive reveal clearly that a regular correspondence existed.

My dear little girl, See how little luck I have with you? The day you left I wired you a single word which expressed all my hope and all my desire, ‘au revoir’. The telegram was returned to me …and, once more, this very warm remembrance of my friendship for you, of my regrets, did not reach you.

However the letter which you sent me when you were about to leave the steamer reached me and caused me all the pleasure you intended it to do.

I am happy in the thought that these three years of such sustained and productive work on your part have also been a period of joy and rest for you and that they will, at the end of your adolescence and at the beginning of your youth, be a period you will look back to for a long time with satisfaction and serenity.

But she worried about ER’s entrance into society, lest her three years’ work disappear

quickly into the mist of the past. From this very minute, when I am writing to you, life, your life, which is entirely new and entirely different, and in several respects entirely contradictory, is going to take you and drag you into its turmoil. Protect yourself to some extent against it, my dear child, protect yourself above all from the standpoint of your health…. Give some of your energy, but not all, to worldly pleasures which are going to beckon you. And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought-after women at a ball….

Tell me how you have found your grandmother and little brother. He does not yet know the value of your warm sisterly tenderness; but he will …and you will become for him what you desire to be….

Goodbye, dear child, I must get dressed; I miss you during our voyages….

A thousand and a thousand tendernesses to my Totty whom I shall always love.

M. Souvestre

Dear Child, Although I wrote to you just a few days ago, the letter, dated from the third, which I received from you today, seems to require an answer for which I do not want you to wait.

First, about my portrait. Why didn’t you ask for it? I would have given it to you immediately, and with such pleasure! But I never offer to give one. You might say it is a principle. People’s impressions are variable. Some prefer the ever-changing and diverse image of a loved face which their memory shows them, to the stilted expression on a photograph or a portrait. Often one asks for a photograph more to please…. And I want it understood between my friends and me that I am insensitive to this small flattery. But as I believe that it is indeed for yourself you ask my photograph, you shall receive it….

I am in Switzerland, at Cluny, delighted, when the weather is nice, to live in the sky, annoyed when it is bad, to live only in clouds. I would like to have you with me. I miss you every day of my life, but it is a selfish regret for which I reprove myself. You fulfill your destiny more where you are, than you would near me. Mlle Samaia is at Chaxlin with her sister, 4 or 5 kms from me.

Till soon, dear child. I love you and kiss you.

The last letter that survives from Marie Souvestre is dated 5 October 1902, from Allenswood.

Dear Child,… Yesterday quantities of letters from you arrived at Allenswood. There were none for me among the ones I distributed, but I hope I shall be luckier next week. Leonie’s letter to Mlle Samaia written from your home, was of much interest to me also, since it portrays you, in your surroundings, as you wouldn’t present yourself. I am happy to see that your brother is becoming more and more attached to you. I can understand how your aunt’s regrets, seeing the preferences of such a dearly loved nephew pass from herself to you, are a source of sorrow to you. But as it is, after all, the direction his affection should take, your aunt will finally accept what is legitimate. Moreover, it seems to me your aunts are carried away in a whirl of exciting social activities which protects them against lasting regret of a sentimental nature.

Dear child, my mind is so divided in respect to you. I should like to know that you are happy, and yet how I fear to hear that you have been unable to defend yourself against all the temptations which surround you; evenings out, pleasure, flirtations. How all this will estrange you from all that I knew you to be! Mrs. Robinson assured me that she would take you with her as often as possible, and that Mrs. Cowles would do the same….

Please tell me when the big season of social dissipations starts in New York? When does it end? Is it immediately after the carnival season, and is it true that we shall see you here in the spring?…

Ah! how we miss you here, my dear child. There are many new girls and, as is their habit, the English girls do not know how to welcome them, and leave them in the corner. You would have known how to make them feel rapidly at ease, and happy in circumstances so different from their usual lives; for some are German, others French, another one, coming from Algeria and born of English parents…. There is a new English girl, very bright and lively, and another one, quite stupid. Finally your fellow Americans are going to present quite a respectable front…. Bennett came for the opening of school. I wish she were here much more often, for she has the best influence on the girls, and they love her. However, I don’t believe that her mother feels much pleasure at seeing her take such an absorbing interest in her former school, and I do not call on her as frequently as I would wish.

Please convey my best compliments to your grandmother, and my thanks for the letter she sent me. I shall answer it soon, and send her your last papers, which Mlle Samaia had given me, and which stayed in my desk.

You never told me how your money problems were resolved. Have you the control of a definite sum …as long as you are a minor, or does someone simply pay your expenses….

Till soon, my good child. Winter is coming, the flowers are dying in the garden, the horizon is hidden behind a heavy, motionless curtain of gray mists, the sad days are beginning in this country where they are sadder than anywhere else. I wish you what we lack: light and sun.

For the rest of her life, ER always kept Marie Souvestre’s portrait on her desk. In her memoirs, she noted that she cherished her teacher’s letters and, like those her father had written, carried them with her all her life. In the summer of 1905, ER visited Allenswood while on her honeymoon. But Marie Souvestre had died of cancer on 30 March. She had, however, sent a one-word telegram that arrived the morning of ER’s wedding, on 17 March: “BONHEUR!” ER noted in her letter home that she “saw Mlle Samaia, but it was dreadful without Mlle Souvestre.”

In October 1905, ER was part of a “Marie Souvestre Memorial” Committee, which included Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Beatrice Chamberlain, John Morley, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Alexander Ribot, Frau Dr. von Siemens, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the Stracheys.

The great teacher was mourned by many, and her obituary in the London Times testified to her extraordinary life:

…She will be mourned by a large number of pupils and friends in Europe and in America, and by many in the world of literature, art, and politics. Her strong individuality, her rare eloquence, and wide learning exerted a lasting influence over all who came in contact with her…. The intense enthusiasm she could inspire in the young for things of the mind, for courageous judgment, and for a deep sense of public duty was the special gift by which her personality impressed itself on all around her…. Her lectures on history and on the great social movements of the past, rich with the fire of a French causeur and full of original thought, will long be remembered…. A zealous politician, a convinced Liberal, and a passionate friend of all great problems of nationality, she ever held up a high ideal of public honour and patriotism. Nor was she less striking in all her judgments about literature and art…. She will long be remembered as having brought into English society …some of the finest traditions of Parisian culture and not a few of the noblest gifts of the French genius.

Eleanor Roosevelt never turned away from the memory of Marie Souvestre. Her influence and spirit burned deeply within ER, and her teachings continually pointed in the direction of what was possible by way of independence, self-fulfillment, public activity, and human understanding.

5. Allenswood and Marie Souvestre