Thoughts of Edith provoked an intense yearning in Teedie during his family’s yearlong trip to Europe. “It was verry [sic] hard parting from our friend,” he confided in his diary. Six months into the Grand Tour, when the family was in France, he dramatically revealed to his diary that a glance at Edith’s picture provoked “homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.” Edith eagerly awaited his return, promising to keep all Teedie’s letters so they could read them over back in New York and relive his adventure together.
Edith’s parents considered sending Edith to school when Mrs. Gracie’s lessons ceased during the Roosevelts’ time abroad. In the end, they decided to postpone her entry until the following fall, fearful she was already damaging her eyes by constant reading. “Whenever they see a book in my hands,” she told Corinne, “they give me no peace till I lay it down.”
Edith was nine years old when a bankruptcy warrant was issued against her father’s estate. The New York Times followed the proceedings for weeks, reporting creditor meetings and the auction sale of several ships, including the Edith, named after his daughter. Charles quickly realized he had no choice but to seek more frugal living arrangements. That summer, his family moved with Aunt Kermit to a more modest house on West 44th Street.
The Carows’ reduced means did not prevent them from enrolling Edith in Miss Comstock’s renowned private school for girls at West 40th Street. Nor did Gertrude scrimp on the stylish clothes her daughter required to join her classmates for regular forays to the symphony or theatre. Miss Comstock, headmistress of the fashionable school, was a formidable figure to the young girls. Edith’s schoolmate Fanny Smith described the “terrifying charm” of that “impressive-looking woman with flashing dark eyes and clear-cut features.” The curriculum included history, languages, arithmetic, zoology, botany, poetry, drama, and literature. Edith proved to be a diligent and exceptional student. “When I come home, I study my lessons, and when I think I know them I read,” she told Corinne, who was still being schooled by private tutors. “I like my composition class very much,” she confided, and “I am trying hard for the Arithmetic and Department prizes and hope to get them.”
At Miss Comstock’s, Edith developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. “I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do,” she would write to her son Kermit seven decades later. “Usually the Historical plays, or Hamlet or Macbeth. Lear is too tragic. This time I read As You Like It. There can be nothing more delightful! I believe if it were lost I could write it out.” She could memorize and recite numerous poems, including John Milton’s Lycidas in its entirety, and was able to quote extensively from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Romantic poets.
Edith also cultivated a defensive air of detachment during her school-days, declining to participate in the costumed tableaux and girlish gossip that so fascinated her classmates. Her beloved books often took precedence over friends, leading schoolmates to reproach her for “indifference.” Years later, Edith explained that her aloofness was simply “a trick of manner” to obscure her own perceived defects. While it may have deprived her of camaraderie, her tactic succeeded in establishing the distance and mystery that prevented humiliation. “Girls,” one of her fellow classmates observed, “I believe you could live in the same house with Edith for fifty years and never really know her.”
Edith’s friendship with the Roosevelt family remained her lodestar, helping her navigate a troubled girlhood as her father became more and more unstable and her mother descended into hypochondria and depression. When the Roosevelts returned from their first trip abroad, Edith joined Corinne, Theodore, and Elliott in a weekly dancing class taught by the demanding Mr. Dodsworth. The dance lessons were “the happiness of many New York children of those years,” Edith remembered. A half century later Edith could still recall her pride as she and Corinne, “the only two who had satisfied our difficult and critical teacher,” were called onto the floor to dance the minuet all alone. Fanny Smith never forgot the pleasure of belonging to that “little group of girls and boys wearing special badges and pledged either definitely or otherwise only to dance with one another.”
During the summers at Tranquillity, Edith was a regular houseguest. In particular, she excelled in the word games the young people loved to play, “ ‘Consequences,’ ‘Truth,’ and nearly always ‘Crambo,’ when each one would draw from a hat a folded question and from another hat a word, and then in the few minutes allotted would answer the question in verse which should include the word we had drawn.” In the afternoons, “the happy six” would row across the bay: Theodore with Edith, Elliott with Corinne, their cousin West Roosevelt with Fanny, whom he “much worshipped.” They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper’s Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. “In the early days,” Fanny recalled, “we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith.” Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare.
The Roosevelts celebrated Edith’s birthdays as if she were a member of the family. “I cannot believe that my sweet little fair, golden-haired friend, whom I have loved since she was three years old is really fifteen today,” Aunt Gracie wrote. Edith was included in small family dinners and visits to the theatre. On New Year’s Day, 1877, she stood by Corinne’s side to receive guests. At dancing parties, continuing the partnership begun under Mr. Dodsworth’s tutelage, she regularly paired off with Theodore. At one of Aunt Gracie’s sociables, Corinne and a friend deliberately wandered into the “dimly and suggestively lit” morning room “for the express purpose of interrupting Thee and Edith, who had gone there for a cosy chat.” The party was “far too merry,” Corinne chided, “for a sentimental tete-a-tete.”
Theodore’s departure for Harvard produced the first unraveling in the close-knit circle of family and friends. Refusing to let their cherished scholarly and social coterie vanish with him, Corinne and Edith formed a literary society in which Corinne served as president and Edith as secretary. The group, which included Fanny Smith, Maud Elliott, and Grace Potter, expected members to contribute original poems and short stories to be read aloud and criticized at weekly meetings. As secretary, Edith was charged with copying and organizing the submissions into a “Weekly Bulletin.”
Edith personally produced dozens of poems, short stories, and essays, which she carefully preserved in her papers. The Roosevelt family biographer Betty Boyd Caroli observes that in her writings for this intimate circle, “Edith revealed about as much about herself as she ever permitted anyone to see.”
Her poem entitled “My Dream Castles,” written during Theodore’s freshman year at Harvard, suggests the lonely distance she maintained despite her inclusion in the Roosevelt household. While she might join in their games and celebrations, loving friendship and charity could not entirely ease an outsider’s sense of loss, of alienation:
To my castles none may enter
But the few
Holding to my inmost feelings
Love’s own clue.
They may wander there at will
Ever welcome finding still,
Warm and true.
Only one, one tiny room
Locked they find,
One thin curtain that they ne’er
Gaze behind.
There my lost ambitions sleep,
To their tear-wept slumber deep
Long consigned.
This my lonely sanctum is;
There I go
When my heart all worn by grief
Sinketh low.
Where my baseless hopes do lie
There to find my peace, go I.
Sad and slow . . .
Romantic longing and a self-dramatizing nostalgia resonate in her words, an elegy for the warm companionship of the dream family she feared would be left behind with their childhoods. In another poem, “Memories,” she once again reveals the profound anxiety of a melancholy girl confronting adult
hood at the end of her day:
I sit alone in the twilight
In the twilight gloomy grey
And think with a sad regretting
For the days that have passed away.
Both Corinne and Fanny recognized a superior quality in Edith’s writings. “She reads more and writes better than any girl I know,” Corinne noted in her diary. For Corinne, whose literary ambitions would drive her to become an accomplished poet, this was not easy to admit. Indeed, she often found Edith’s criticism of her work overwhelming and her personality inscrutable. Still, she could not help loving best of all her “clever” friend, “tall and fair, with lovely complexion and golden hair.” She confided in her journal: “I have a feeling for Edith which I have for no one else, a tender kind of feeling. I am always careful of her and then I know quite well that I love her much more than she does me in fact.”
In the spring of Theodore’s freshman year, Theodore Senior brought a small party of young people to visit him at Harvard, including Bamie, Corinne, and Elliott, along with Edith Carow and Maud Elliott. “What fun we did have,” Corinne remembered, describing lively lunches and dinners with her brother and his friends, Johnny Lamson and Harry Jackson. They played hide-and-seek, attended the theatre, and enjoyed long carriage rides through the surrounding countryside. Edith and Theodore again found themselves partners, riding in one carriage, while Corinne and Maud were paired with Lamson and Jackson.
“The family all went home, leaving me disconsolate,” Theodore recorded in his diary. “The last three days have been great fun.” Arriving in New York, Edith immediately wrote to Theodore, echoing his sentiment. She had “enjoyed to the utmost” every moment of “three perfectly happy days.” Theodore admitted to Corinne that he had never seen “Edith looking prettier; everyone, and especially Harry Chapin and Minot Weld admired her little Ladyship intensely, and she behaved as sweetly as she looked.”
Edith’s cherished relationship with Theodore remained constant in the following months, as did her friendship with Corinne. When Theodore Senior lay dying, Corinne confided her grief and frustration to her oldest friend. “Oh Edith, it is the most frightful thing to see the person you love best in the world in terrible pain, and not be able to do a thing to alleviate it.” The following summer, Edith joined Theodore and Corinne at Oyster Bay as the Roosevelt children tried to distract themselves from the sorrow of the patriarch’s death.
In his diary, Theodore described days spent sailing with Edith or rowing with her to the harbor where the steamboats from the city landed. He wrote of “spending a lovely morning with her” driving to Cold Spring Harbor to pick water lilies.
The next day, August 22, 1878, he took Mittie, Elliott, Corinne, and Edith on a long sail, followed by tea at his cousin West’s house. The mysterious severance in their relationship occurred that same evening. In his diary, Theodore merely notes: “Afterwards Edith & I went up to the summer house.” What transpired there would become the subject of much speculation by Roosevelt’s family and friends. Some postulated that Edith had refused Theodore’s offer of marriage, although her intense devotion makes such a scenario unlikely. Furthermore, an initial refusal would hardly have deterred Theodore, who would shortly prove his tenacity in his courtship of Alice. Corinne suggested a different reason, indicating that her dying father had expressed concern about Theodore’s intimacy with Edith, given Charles Carow’s fiscal and temperamental instability. If Theodore discussed the issue with Edith that night, he might well have triggered the volatility that he would obscurely explain to Bamie as a clash of tempers “that were far from being of the best.” This, too, is mere conjecture. Neither Edith nor Theodore ever talked about what happened.
We know only that eight weeks later, Theodore met Alice Hathaway Lee, fell in love “at first sight,” and launched the spirited campaign “to win her” that concluded successfully in the winter of 1880. Before the engagement was announced in mid-February, Theodore wrote to Edith. Years later, Corinne spoke of the “shock” Edith experienced when she heard the news. The summer months that year must have been lacerating for Edith; another woman would be Theodore’s constant companion, displacing her on morning drives to Cold Spring, afternoon sailing and rowing excursions, and private evening tête-à-têtes in the summerhouse.
Edith was long accustomed to mastering her private sorrows. She schooled herself to participate in the engagement and wedding festivities of the man she adored. Arriving at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston two nights before the marriage, she crowded into an upstairs chamber with Fanny and Grace, while the Roosevelt family occupied two suites downstairs. “We had great fun,” Fanny recorded in her diary. They explored the town and shared meals at a large table, where “wild spirits” prevailed. The next morning, Edith, Grace, and Fanny drove to the church together. At the reception following the ceremony, Edith reportedly “danced the soles off her shoes.”
Her brave attempt to affect gaiety was not the only trial Edith would face. The death of Mrs. Kermit, with whom Edith had lived since she was a small child, was soon followed by the final days of her gentle grandfather, General Tyler. Initially, she continued to see a great deal of Corinne, Fanny, and Aunt Gracie, who held a weekly sewing class for the girls once their formal schooling ended. Soon, however, she found herself quite forsaken as both Corinne and Fanny became engaged. Edith and Fanny served together as bridesmaids at Corinne’s wedding. “All yesterday I thought of nothing but you from morning to night,” she explained to her oldest friend. “I do not mean I was sad or grieving for that would be impossible when I know how happy you are going to be, but I kept realizing that you were leaving your old life behind, and if we live to be ninety years old we can never be two girls together again.”
In 1883, yet another death seemed to complete the disintegration of Edith’s support system. Charles Carow, his body weakened by decades of drinking, collapsed and died that spring. He left his wife and daughters without sufficient means to maintain their accustomed life. Recognizing that they could live abroad more cheaply than in New York, Gertrude made plans for an extended sojourn in Europe with Edith and Emily. While rumor circulated that Edith might marry “for money,” such gossip proved groundless. Even as more and more of her friends were engaged or married, Edith maintained her solitude. As the circle of her friends diminished, she sought consolation in her treasured books, keeping a careful record of the hundreds of volumes she completed. During this desolate period, Edith purportedly held on to the belief that “someday, somehow, she would marry Theodore Roosevelt.” She certainly never anticipated the grim coincidence that left Theodore’s wife and mother dead on the same day. Though Edith joined the family at the funeral service and frequently saw Corinne, Bamie, and Aunt Gracie in the months that followed, there is no evidence that she and Theodore connected until their chance encounter at Bamie’s house in October 1885.
THEODORE WAS REMARKABLY ALTERED FROM the young man Edith had last seen. Months laboring under the Badlands sun had hardened his body and bronzed his skin, but he had the same bright eyes, the same splendid smile. Edith herself had become a handsome young woman, still “the most cultivated, best read girl” he knew. In the days that followed, he became a regular visitor, enlivening the parlor of her 36th Street town house. Perhaps their old friendship and mutual losses quickened the relationship. On November 17, 1885, they pledged themselves to marry. The engagement opened a world of joy for Edith, an emergence from five years of bleak nightmare. If the love Theodore developed for Edith lacked the extreme sentimental idealism of his love for Alice, their complex, ever-strengthening bond would sustain a mature and lifelong growth and happiness.
The early months of his reunion with Edith, however, were clouded by Theodore’s Victorian belief that second marriages “argued weakness in a man’s character.” He insisted upon a sufficient interval before informing anyone, even their families, about their intention to marry. Acutely aware of the importance of appearances, Edith decided to accompany her
mother and sister to Europe that spring as planned, allowing time to elapse before any public announcement of the engagement. In the meantime, they felt there was nothing wrong with two old friends keeping company during the winter social season. Once again, Edith joined the Roosevelts at the Essex County Hunt Ball, theatre parties at Aunt Annie’s, and dinners at Bamie’s. Respecting their secret even in his private diary, Theodore never wrote out Edith’s full name, though the capital E appears day after day, reflecting the extensive time they spent together.
In the spring of 1886, Edith sailed to Europe and Theodore returned to the Badlands. In New York, he had begun work on a biography of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, which he hoped to complete at his ranch in Medora. Though separated by nearly 5,000 miles, the couple sustained their relationship month after month through the exchange of long letters. In early June, just five weeks after Edith’s arrival in London, she had already received seventeen letters from Theodore and written almost as many in return. “How fond one is of old letters and how one prizes them,” Edith had written in her composition book at Miss Comstock’s. “I never wish to destroy even a note.” Though she cherished each word, the intensely private Edith would one day burn nearly their entire correspondence from this period. Only one full letter remains—the same letter in which she declared to Theodore that she loved him “with all the passion of a girl who has never loved before.”