What is recorded, in letters Rosemary wrote from various schools and homes over the years, is a young woman who was acutely aware of her family’s expectations and who worked hard to meet them. Her handwriting was childlike, her spelling imperfect, her sentences sometimes incomplete. But the emotional content of those letters was clear: she wanted to do well, she wanted to please her parents, she wanted to be part of the family she loved. “I would do anything to make you so happy,” she wrote in one letter to her father, in words that Larson’s biography excerpts. The urgency behind those words — the striving, the longing — is not the voice of someone without feeling or awareness. It is the voice of someone who understood, at some level, that she was trying to clear a bar she could not quite reach.
School after School after School
Between approximately 1929 and 1940, Rosemary Kennedy attended a series of educational institutions, each chosen with the hope that it would provide what the previous one had not.
At around age eleven she was sent to a boarding school in Pennsylvania that served children with intellectual disabilities. Her mother was reportedly reluctant to send her away from home, and the separation was difficult. The Pennsylvania school was followed by others — sources list approximately five schools over a nine-year span, though the precise sequence and dates vary across accounts.
At sixteen she attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Elmhurst, Providence, Rhode Island, where she was educated separately from the general student body by two nuns and a special teacher. Her reading, writing, spelling, and counting, by accounts from that period, were at roughly a fourth-grade level. She was a teenager in a school environment calibrated for much younger children, working through material that came easily to most of her classmates.