Loving Eleanor

When AP political reporter Lorena Hickok--Hick--is assigned to cover Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt the wife of the 1932 Democratic presidential candidate the two women become deeply intimately involved. Their relationship begins with mutual romantic passion matures through stormy periods of enforced separation and competing interests and warms into an enduring encompassing friendship that ends only with both womens deaths in the 1960s--all of it documented by 3300 letters exchanged over thirty years.Now New York Times bestselling author Susan Wittig Albert recreates the fascinating story of Hick and Eleanor set during the chaotic years of the Great Depression the New Deal and the Second World War. Loving Eleanor is Hicks personal story revealing Eleanor as a complex contradictory and entirely human woman who is pulled in many directions by her obligations to her husband and family and her role as the nations First Lady as well as by a compelling need to care and be cared for. For her part Hick is revealed as an accomplished journalist who at the pinnacle of her career gives it all up for the woman she loves. Then as Eleanor is transformed into Eleanor Everywhere First Lady of the World Hick must create her own independent productive life.Drawing on extensive research in the letters that were sealed for a decade following Hicks death Albert creates a compelling narrative: a dramatic love story vividly portraying two strikingly unconventional women neither of whom is satisfied to live according to the script society has written for her. Loving Eleanor is a profoundly moving novel that illuminates a relationship we are seldom privileged to see and celebrates the depth and durability of womens love.