This Is My Story
by
[Harpers, $3.00]
OF autobiographies of women, comparatively few and far between in earlier centuries, when they have usually assumed the guise of letters or memoirs, are coming into their own in the twentieth century, and have achieved an almost pellmell crescendo during the passing decade: Edith Wharton, Margaret Chanler, Mary Heaton Vorse. Sarah Cleghorn, Vida Dutton Scudder, Ruth Huntington Sessions, Queen Marie of Rumania, — others will come to mind, — women of letters, women of affairs, sometimes just women, recording their impressions, revealing their temperaments, unfolding their theories and their ideals, criticizing the universe or their fathers and mothers; and now Eleanor Roosevelt, a far cry from Abigail Adams, but a sister-under-the-skin, adds to the list the unpretentious but vital story of the first forty years of her life.
Let it be said at once that Mrs. Roosevelt is not a woman of letters, nor would she expect to be so considered; modesty and clear-sightedness are among her notable traits. Her book has not what we usually understand as literary distinction; it is not, technically speaking, well-written; yet, as an autobiography it may quite truthfully be described as distinguished, for from the successions of abrupt, clipped, sometimes awkward, curiously colorless, and more or less casual sentences there emerges a noble and notable personality.
First, against the faded foolishness of her aristocratic American background, the little girl: lonely, sensitive, intelligent, absurdly uneducated and unaccountably detached, with a social conscience already stirring in embryo. Then, the bewildered girl of the quaint European school years, of the gawky debutante seasons, of the early marriage, trying to find the real person, the integrated, independent being, who was herself. In an autobiography which is, on the surface, a chronicle of not always visibly cogent incidents, this is a real achievement.
We are more than halfway through the book before the author, in her young maturity, begins consciously to exert her own initiative. Motherhood, and her husband’s entrance into politics, and finally the war, increase and accelerate confidence in herself, and through the latter half of the book we have the picture of a woman of capacity and devotion rising to the opportunities and vicissitudes of life with zest and assurance. To have written of her introspective youth and her mature accomplishment without a touch of egotism is a genuine triumph, yet this is what Mrs. Roosevelt has done.
The book is perhaps essentially a woman’s book. It was written for a woman’s magazine. The feminine approach is frankly adopted, and the domestic scene is amplified. But it is the story of a woman whose judgments are considered, whose economic and social interests are wide and modern, and whose knowledge of men, as well as of women, is intelligently keen. The publishers have called attention to the candor of the narrative, but it is also characterized by a wise and discreet reticence. The political history of her husband, his illness, are treated with impeccable taste. The story ends with the reëlect ion of Alfred E. Smith to the Governorship of New York. There is a hint that a second volume may follow when the time is ripe. The years between 1924 and 1940 will give Mrs. Roosevelt a great opportunity for both candor and reticence.
FLORENCE CONVERSE