Enormously well-researched biography of Eleanor Roosevelt; this first volume covers her life up until FDR was elected President. It's compulsively readable - once you get past the inbred Roosevelt genealogy of the first chapter, anyway, which was in dire need of a family tree to try and distinguish all the relations - even for someone like me who knew pretty much nothing about ER and needed everything explained.

It's also extraordinarily sympathetic, and I'm not sure if this is helped or hindered by the author's refusal to overtly cast a great deal of judgement. Flaws aren't papered over - Eleanor's or anyone else's - but I'm afraid that didn't stop me from judging. There are times you just want to reach into pages and give someone a good slap. Not so much Eleanor, although her anti-Semitism and other racist proclivities deserved it (though I am holding off a little as I understand she addresses that aspect of herself and improves in volume 2 of the biography... we shall see). But the people around her who variously refused to give credit where it was due and looked down upon her for having interests outside of her prescribed role as wife and mother. Her sons, in particular, come across here as patronising little shits, as does her often oblivious husband and horribly interfering mother-in-law. Frankly, Eleanor doesn't seem to have had a great deal of luck in her near relations, although there are some shocking passages that make her early attempts at motherhood seem pretty bloody grim. Half the wider family seem hopeless alcoholics anyway, so I suppose at least she escaped that.

But that sense of sympathy derives, I think, largely from the sense of a clearly enormously talented woman who came very close to having all the life and capability sucked out of her. Her growing recognition of her own talent for politics, and her relationships with other women in forwarding the feminist agenda was pretty much the saving grace. Surprisingly - at least to me, because I was as ignorant of American political history as I was of ER herself - that agenda forced forward, against all opposition, a lot of the labour and social welfare reforms that we take as standard today, but which were perceived as genuinely radical back then. I have to say, though, watching the politicians in power ignore, criticise, betray, and exploit the women activists of the day is looking ever more familiar...