On My Own.
Roosevelt, Eleanor. On My Own. New York: Harpers, (1958).
8vo.; 16 pages of photographs; light offsetting to preliminaries; blue cloth, stamped in gilt; fresh and bright; photographic dust-jacket with occasional scuffmarks, edges rough, closed tears at lower front and back.
First edition, later issue. Inscribed to her son James and his wife: To James & Irene with love from Mother (Eleanor Roosevelt) Xmas 1958. James, Eleanor’s first son, was born on December 23, 1907 and named after FDR’s father. Eleanor’s children were born in quick succession, and for the first few years of her marriage, mothering took up most of Eleanor’s time. She wrote to a friend in 1917: “Anna is going to be capable and dependable I think and James already devours books and I think will have an interesting mind. Elliott is just very lovable and sensitive and stormy and the two babies very soft and adorable” (Cook, p. 226).
Like his sister Anna, James married early. He became engaged to a woman named Betsy Cushing during his junior year at Harvard; Eleanor wrote to FDR with lukewarm praise for the girl, calling her “a nice child, family excellent, nothing to be said against it....Perhaps it will be a good influence and in any case we can do nothing about it” (Cook, p. 396). That marriage ended in divorce, as did his second. Irene was James’s third wife.
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