Download The Three Graces of Val-Kill: Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook in the Place They Made Their Own AudioBook Free
The Three Graces of Val-Kill changes just how we think about Eleanor Roosevelt. Emily Wilson examines what she telephone calls the most formative period in Roosevelt's life, from 1922 to 1936, when she cultivated an intimate friendship with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, who helped her build a cottage on the Val-Kill Creek in Hyde Park on the Roosevelt family land. In the early years, the three women - the "three graces", as Franklin Delano Roosevelt called them - were nearly inseparable and forged a female-centered community for each other, for family, and then for New York's progressive women. Examining this network of close female friends offers listeners a more comprehensive picture of the Roosevelts and Eleanor's burgeoning freedom in the years that noticeable Franklin's rise to vitality in politics. Wilson will take care to show all the nuances and complexities of the women's marriage, which combined the political with the personal. Val-Kill was not only home to Eleanor Roosevelt but also an essential part of how she became one of the most admired American political characters of the 20th century. In Wilson's informing, she emerges from the shadows of monumental histories and documentaries as a female searching for herself.
