A captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century—by award-winning historian Charlotte Gray.

Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicentre of political power on two continents.

In the mid-19th century, the British Empire was at its height, France’s Second Empire flourished, and the industrial vigor of the United States of America was catapulting the republic towards the Gilded Age. Sara and Jennie, raised with privilege but subject to the constraints of women’s roles at the time, learned how to take control of their destinies—Sara in the prosperous Hudson Valley, and Jennie in the glittering world of Imperial London.

Yet their personalities and choices were dramatically different. A vivacious extrovert, Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill, a rising politician and scion of a noble British family. Her deft social and political maneuverings helped not only her mercurial husband but, once she was widowed, her ambitious son, Winston. By contrast, deeply conventional Sara Delano married a man as old as her father. But once widowed, she made Franklin, her only child, the focus of her existence. Thanks in large part to her financial support and to her guidance, Franklin acquired the skills he needed to become a successful politician.

Set against one hundred years of history, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons is a study in loyalty and resilience. Gray argues that Jennie and Sara are too often presented as lesser figures in the backdrop of history rather than as two remarkable individuals who were key in shaping the characters of the sons who adored them and in preparing them for leadership on the world stage.

Impeccably researched and filled with intriguing social insights, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons breathes new life into Sara and Jennie, offering a fascinating and fulsome portrait of how leaders are not just born but made.

Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers, and author of ten acclaimed books of literary non-fiction. Gray’s most recent bestseller is The Promise of Canada: People And Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country. Her previous book,  The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and The Trial that Shocked a Country, was also a bestseller and won the Toronto Book Award, the Heritage Toronto Book Award, the Canadian Authors Association Lela Common Award for Canadian History and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book. It was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize, the Ottawa Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Evergreen Award and was long-listed for the B.C. National Book Award for Non-Fiction. An adaptation of her bestseller Gold Diggers, Striking It Rich in the Klondike was broadcast as a television miniseries in early 2014 on the US Discovery Channel, under the title Klondike.

An Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Charlotte is the Recipient of the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history. She has chaired the boards of both Canada’s National History Society and the Art Canada Institute, has served on the boards of PEN Canada and the Ottawa International Writers Festival. She has frequently served on Writers Trust committees, as well as being a juror for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the RBC Taylor Prize, the City of Ottawa Book Prize, several CBC awards and the Kobzar Literary Award. Charlotte is a member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Charlotte Gray's profile page

“Entirely original and brilliant. [Gray] weaves together the parallel but remarkably different lives of Sara Roosevelt and Jennie Churchill, as wives as well as mothers, and explores their fascinatingly dissimilar guidance of their famous sons’ futures. Fresh, original, superbly researched, intimate, compelling, perceptive, sensitive, and immensely readable, it is not to be missed.”
— RONALD COHEN, author of the three-volume Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill

“A terrific and insightful double biography.”
— Wall Street Journal

“Charlotte Gray has put two truly remarkable women—Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt—in the spotlight. Brilliantly conceived and wonderfully written, their lives and times are illuminated as never before.”
— BOB RAE, diplomat and author of What’s Happened to Politics?

“Gray hopes her book will encourage people to think more about the breadth of women’s lives. With her own passion for historical detail, she has reclaimed the vibrant, extraordinary ones of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt.”
— Toronto Star

“Fascinating, engaging, and thought-provoking insight into the lives and influence of two women whose impact on the course of world events has all too often been reviewed from the male gaze. This book made me develop a greater appreciation for many of the so-called ‘secondary’ characters we read about in history books.”
— ELIZA REID, internationally bestselling author of Secrets of the Sprakkar

“A compassionate and vivid double portrait of Jennie Jerome and Sara Delano. . . . Gray strikes an expert balance between the big picture and intimate glimpses of each woman. It’s an enlightening study of two mothers’ crucial influence upon sons who would make history.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A book that seeks to rehabilitate the reputations of the mothers of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt—women of substance and strength who greatly impacted the lives and careers of their more famous and celebrated sons. . . . But Gray’s most important accomplishment is to show that Jennie Churchill and Sara Roosevelt were far more than just mothers of history-making sons.”
— New York Journal of Books

“Gray has managed to do the virtually impossible, and that is to say something new and perceptive about Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With her usual keen eye for the telling detail and her sympathy for her subjects, she argues for the importance of the statesmen’s relationships with their two very different but forceful mothers.”
— MARGARET MacMILLAN, New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 and War

“In this provocative biography, Charlotte Gray bestows revisionist interest on two 'passionate mothers' whose 'powerful sons' proved themselves worthy of the maternal love and devotion showered on each.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books

“This is a spectacular book, brilliantly and magnetically written. It’s a story about the passionate love of two remarkable mothers and their two remarkable sons, but it’s also transcendently about all mothers and their sons.”
— ROSALIE ABELLA, former Canadian Supreme Court justice and professor of law at Harvard Law School