Little House biographies
BS"D
I don't know if anyone out there still reads this journal, but here are two more book reviews, one for a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and another for the bio of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend by John E. Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Given the classic status of the Little House series, I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that it’s become a popular topic amongst literary historians, especially in the Midwest. Two professors at the University of Missouri have taken up the question of the influence of Laura’s daughter Rose on the series. Professor William Holtz argues in his book The Ghost in the Little House that Rose ghost wrote the series. This book, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, is a rebuttal of his argument, contending that while the book couldn’t have come about without Rose, Laura wrote the bulk of it. I read this one first because I prefer that position, but had I known that it was actually written in response to Holtz’s book, I might have done differently.
My preference for crediting Laura isn’t just emotional. The books portray the Ingalls family as valuing education almost above all else. They study in the house through The Long Winter and they scrimp and save just to put Mary through the College for the Blind. Of course, if you accept that Rose ghostwrote the series, you can argue that that’s just part of her invention, but I think the historical facts point otherwise. Charles Ingalls was not just a simple farmer and carpenter; he ended up holding political office in De Smet. A visit to the website of the Vinton School for the Blind (which still exists) will tell you that its most famous graduate, Mary Amelia Ingalls, was a top student. As an adult, Carrie worked in the newspaper business in South Dakota. And most significantly, Laura began her own writing career as a columnist for a small-town newspaper much like the one Carrie was working for. Her articles are collected in Little House in the Ozarks, which is essential reading before embarking on this book. It’s a fresh new way to experience Laura’s voice.
As I stated above, the author, Professor John E. Miller, makes it clear that Rose was pivotal in the development of the series. She became an author before her mother did, and aside from actually editing the books, she was the one who put her mother in touch with agents and publishers. The relationship between mother and daughter, however, was anything but smooth. As much as Laura represented home life and simplicity, Rose bucked tradition and sought out adventure. She had quite an interesting life, and I am looking forward to learning more about it in The Ghost in the Little House. I could not help but conclude, though, that not only wouldn’t the books have come about without her, they wouldn’t have come about if she had settled down and had a family. Laura never had grandchildren, but with Rose, she had the series.
I noticed that several other Good Reads reviewers found that all the historical background in the book made it dull. Well, one reader’s boredom is another‘s education. I think it adds tremendous depth to consider how Laura wrote these books during the Great Depression, and that The Long Winter, the ultimate story of triumph over hardship, was published in 1940, the beginning of the war years when rationing was to become a reality for all Americans. The book may not be entertaining, but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to enrich our understandings of how one pioneer girl became one of America’s most beloved children’s authors.
The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the book that I mentioned in my review of Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, the one that contends that Laura’s daughter Rose ghostwrote the Little House series. I read it with the expectation that the author would provide documentary evidence for his thesis, but unfortunately, the excerpts comparing Laura’s manuscripts to Rose’s edits are shown only in an appendix at the end. These particular excerpts do indeed support his thesis - Rose’s edits gave the text life - but there were too few examples to come to a fair conclusion. I would have been happy to read a complete line-by-line comparison of all the manuscripts and books, but I’m an editor. Most fans would probably lose interest after a while. Possibly I would, too.
So while the author didn’t present as much documentary evidence I was hoping for, he did present a vivid and well-researched biography of Rose Wilder Lane. A running theme throughout the book is from the Christian myth of the wandering Jew. When Rose was a little girl, she was sitting with her pious grandmother Caroline Ingalls and remarked that she wished she had lived in the times of the man the Christians worship.
“Why, dear?” asked Grandma Ingalls, no doubt hoping to “shep some nachas” from the answer.
“So then I could curse him and become the wandering Jew.”
As Rose described it, Caroline was silent, but it was as though an explosion had gone off in the room.
That was Rose. Even at that early age, she was showing signs of rebellion. She left the farm as soon as she could, first by attending school in Louisiana where her aunt Eliza Jane was living and then emerging into adulthood with a job as a telegraph operator. She did have a short-lived marriage, but ended up disparaging the institution altogether: ”Marry at eighteen, and get it all over with by twenty-five.” Tragically, like Caroline and Laura before her, she lost a son in his infancy. After that, she had some sort of operation, and the author assumes that left her unable to bear children ever again. If she had remained tied to a husband and kids, her life and American literature would have been very different.
Even as a married woman, Rose was living a bohemian and literary life in San Francisco. After her divorce, she ran with it, fulfilling her dream of becoming a wandering "Jew." (Either that or it was the wanderlust inherited from her pioneer grandfather, not to mention “Flutterbudget” herself.) Rose lived in Greenwich Village for a time, then toured Europe and parts of the Middle East, settling down in, of all places, Albania, which she found wonderfully exotic. Rose was able to afford servants there, a far cry from the poverty of her early life. Rose had suffered both physically and emotionally on the family farm, no doubt the main reason she wanted to escape. She was seven years old when she first moved to the Ozarks, mocked for her shabby “country girl” clothes, her bare feet, and the donkey that carried her to school every day. It is easy to see how such life experiences could create the composite character of Nellie Oleson.
Throughout her stint in Europe, Rose financed her lifestyle by selling her writing. But even though she was living life on her own terms, her letters and journals, from which the author quotes extensively, give the picture of a manic-depressive. When she was not plagued by insecurities, she was busy throwing herself into some grand project with enthusiastic abandon. I didn’t respect her much, but I could relate to her, especially for this: “The truth is that for better or worse, no matter how hopelessly a failure, I am a writer. I am a writer. Nothing else in the world is so important to me - to my own inner self - as writing is.”
Rose’s European phase cast a whole new light on my favorite essay from Laura’s Missouri Ruralist column, which can be found in Little House in the Ozarks. The essay is called “Are You Your Children’s Confidant?”
“A letter from my mother, who is seventy-six years old, lies on my desk beside a letter from my daughter far away in Europe. Reading the message from my mother, I am a child again and a longing unutterable fills my heart for Mother’s counsel, for the safe haven of her protection . . . But when I turn to the letter written by my daughter, who will always be a little girl to me no matter how old she grows, then I understand and appreciate my mother’s position and her feelings toward me.
“Many of us have the blessed privilege of being at the same time mother and child, able to let the one interpret the other to us until our understanding of both is full and rich. What is there in the attitude of your children toward yourself that you wish were different? Search your heart and learn if your ways toward your own mother could be improved.”
Laura of the Little House books did sometimes chaff against her mother, but her willfulness was nothing compared to Rose’s rebellion. Laura, after all, developed into a dutiful daughter, working selflessly to help pay for Mary’s schooling. Eventually, she settled down and became a proper farm wife, just like her mother. So Rose’s bohemian lifestyle must have come as quite a shock to her. Another of her essays mentions explaining Rose’s divorce to her neighbors. She seemed sympathetic to her daughter, but it couldn’t have been easy. So when Laura asks, “What is there in the attitude of your children toward yourself that you wish were different?,” she probably had a few things in mind for herself. And the tension between them was about to mount. Rose had seen Par-ee, but she had to go back to the farm anyway. She was an only child, and her parents were getting older.
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, written as a rebuttal to this book, also covers the period in which Rose returned to Rocky Ridge farm. Many fans were disappointed to learn that Laura had clay feet when it came to her relations with her daughter, but personally, I blame Rose. For example, Rose directed that a new house be built on Rocky Ridge Farm, and when it was finished, she had her parents leave the one they had built themselves and move into the new one while she moved into the old house. Now, I can see why Rose might have thought she was doing her parents a favor, but I can also understand why Laura reacted coldly to the whole project. What we think is best for our aging parents ain’t necessarily so.
One thing I do not blame Rose for, however, was the investment advice she gave her parents in 1929. The crash impoverished them all, but I don’t see that as a particular lack of foresight on Rose’s part. It happened to everybody. And then, strapped for cash, Rose advised Laura to do what she’d been doing for years: sell her writing. Laura’s first attempt was called “Pioneer Girl” and was actually meant for adults, but when one publisher suggested she turn it into a children’s story in novelized form, the Little House series was born.
As I said, it’s really hard to know for sure whether Rose was ghostwriter or editor. One quote the author uses to support his thesis is in a letter from Laura to Rose seeming to give her a free hand: “Do whatever you want with the d-n stuff. Just clean it up.” The author also cites several letters from Rose to her friends complaining about having to edit for her mother. Ironically, he comments, that work turned out to be the most important of her life, more lasting than anything that bore her own name. Her own novels, Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land, were also based on the Ingalls and Wilder pioneer heritage, though neither won literary awards or became commercial successes the way the Little House series did.
And so Laura, who initially said she was more interested in the accomplishment of writing than the money it would bring her, ended up with a steady income of royalties through the Depression. She did a whole lot better than Carrie and Grace, the former of whom wrote a letter to Laura asking for any cast-off clothes she might have to give away and the latter of whom was receiving some form of New Deal public assistance. As I think I said in my review of Becoming Laura Ingalls, the parallels between the hardships of pioneering and the hardships of the Depression, i.e. past and present for the author, never cease to fascinate me.
And this brings me to the political and economic values taught in the books, clearest in Farmer Boy, but definitely present in everything from By the Shores of Silver Lake onward. Rose, along with Ayn Rand, was a leading voice for libertarianism. The Little House series does have some definite libertarian elements, particularly in The Long Winter (see quotes here) and in this passage of Little Town on The Prairie, which the appendix cites as one of Rose’s additions:
“Suddenly [Laura] had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind and she thought: God is America's king. Americans won't obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. . . . Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. ‘Our father's God, author of liberty.’ The laws of Nature and of Nature's God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God's law is the only thing that gives you the right to be free.”
The appendix also notes a significant libertarian omission: Rose cut the sentence that reveals that Mary’s education at the College for the Blind was government-sponsored. All the money that Laura earned went for train fare, clothing, and other incidentals, not tuition.
All of this begs the question of how much of the books came from Rose’s influence and how much her views converged with her mother’s. Laura also opposed the New Deal, though it seems rather uncharitable to me; most of America didn’t have the benefit of royalties.
After Laura’s death, Rose spent more time on political activism than writing, and in many ways, this was the most interesting part of the book. Roger MacBride, who would later run for president under the libertarian ticket, became Rose’s “adopted grandson.” He also became her heir and eventually received the royalty income from the books. He then sold his rights and became co-producer of the TV series. What a fortune made from Rose and Laura’s efforts! It was more than either lived to see, and both had endured such poverty! But there are many ironies to Rose’s life story, not the least of which is that she etched a permanent place for her mother’s world in American consciousness even though she ran so fast and far away from it herself.
View all my reviews
I don't know if anyone out there still reads this journal, but here are two more book reviews, one for a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and another for the bio of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend by John E. Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Given the classic status of the Little House series, I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that it’s become a popular topic amongst literary historians, especially in the Midwest. Two professors at the University of Missouri have taken up the question of the influence of Laura’s daughter Rose on the series. Professor William Holtz argues in his book The Ghost in the Little House that Rose ghost wrote the series. This book, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, is a rebuttal of his argument, contending that while the book couldn’t have come about without Rose, Laura wrote the bulk of it. I read this one first because I prefer that position, but had I known that it was actually written in response to Holtz’s book, I might have done differently.
My preference for crediting Laura isn’t just emotional. The books portray the Ingalls family as valuing education almost above all else. They study in the house through The Long Winter and they scrimp and save just to put Mary through the College for the Blind. Of course, if you accept that Rose ghostwrote the series, you can argue that that’s just part of her invention, but I think the historical facts point otherwise. Charles Ingalls was not just a simple farmer and carpenter; he ended up holding political office in De Smet. A visit to the website of the Vinton School for the Blind (which still exists) will tell you that its most famous graduate, Mary Amelia Ingalls, was a top student. As an adult, Carrie worked in the newspaper business in South Dakota. And most significantly, Laura began her own writing career as a columnist for a small-town newspaper much like the one Carrie was working for. Her articles are collected in Little House in the Ozarks, which is essential reading before embarking on this book. It’s a fresh new way to experience Laura’s voice.
As I stated above, the author, Professor John E. Miller, makes it clear that Rose was pivotal in the development of the series. She became an author before her mother did, and aside from actually editing the books, she was the one who put her mother in touch with agents and publishers. The relationship between mother and daughter, however, was anything but smooth. As much as Laura represented home life and simplicity, Rose bucked tradition and sought out adventure. She had quite an interesting life, and I am looking forward to learning more about it in The Ghost in the Little House. I could not help but conclude, though, that not only wouldn’t the books have come about without her, they wouldn’t have come about if she had settled down and had a family. Laura never had grandchildren, but with Rose, she had the series.
I noticed that several other Good Reads reviewers found that all the historical background in the book made it dull. Well, one reader’s boredom is another‘s education. I think it adds tremendous depth to consider how Laura wrote these books during the Great Depression, and that The Long Winter, the ultimate story of triumph over hardship, was published in 1940, the beginning of the war years when rationing was to become a reality for all Americans. The book may not be entertaining, but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to enrich our understandings of how one pioneer girl became one of America’s most beloved children’s authors.
The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the book that I mentioned in my review of Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, the one that contends that Laura’s daughter Rose ghostwrote the Little House series. I read it with the expectation that the author would provide documentary evidence for his thesis, but unfortunately, the excerpts comparing Laura’s manuscripts to Rose’s edits are shown only in an appendix at the end. These particular excerpts do indeed support his thesis - Rose’s edits gave the text life - but there were too few examples to come to a fair conclusion. I would have been happy to read a complete line-by-line comparison of all the manuscripts and books, but I’m an editor. Most fans would probably lose interest after a while. Possibly I would, too.
So while the author didn’t present as much documentary evidence I was hoping for, he did present a vivid and well-researched biography of Rose Wilder Lane. A running theme throughout the book is from the Christian myth of the wandering Jew. When Rose was a little girl, she was sitting with her pious grandmother Caroline Ingalls and remarked that she wished she had lived in the times of the man the Christians worship.
“Why, dear?” asked Grandma Ingalls, no doubt hoping to “shep some nachas” from the answer.
“So then I could curse him and become the wandering Jew.”
As Rose described it, Caroline was silent, but it was as though an explosion had gone off in the room.
That was Rose. Even at that early age, she was showing signs of rebellion. She left the farm as soon as she could, first by attending school in Louisiana where her aunt Eliza Jane was living and then emerging into adulthood with a job as a telegraph operator. She did have a short-lived marriage, but ended up disparaging the institution altogether: ”Marry at eighteen, and get it all over with by twenty-five.” Tragically, like Caroline and Laura before her, she lost a son in his infancy. After that, she had some sort of operation, and the author assumes that left her unable to bear children ever again. If she had remained tied to a husband and kids, her life and American literature would have been very different.
Even as a married woman, Rose was living a bohemian and literary life in San Francisco. After her divorce, she ran with it, fulfilling her dream of becoming a wandering "Jew." (Either that or it was the wanderlust inherited from her pioneer grandfather, not to mention “Flutterbudget” herself.) Rose lived in Greenwich Village for a time, then toured Europe and parts of the Middle East, settling down in, of all places, Albania, which she found wonderfully exotic. Rose was able to afford servants there, a far cry from the poverty of her early life. Rose had suffered both physically and emotionally on the family farm, no doubt the main reason she wanted to escape. She was seven years old when she first moved to the Ozarks, mocked for her shabby “country girl” clothes, her bare feet, and the donkey that carried her to school every day. It is easy to see how such life experiences could create the composite character of Nellie Oleson.
Throughout her stint in Europe, Rose financed her lifestyle by selling her writing. But even though she was living life on her own terms, her letters and journals, from which the author quotes extensively, give the picture of a manic-depressive. When she was not plagued by insecurities, she was busy throwing herself into some grand project with enthusiastic abandon. I didn’t respect her much, but I could relate to her, especially for this: “The truth is that for better or worse, no matter how hopelessly a failure, I am a writer. I am a writer. Nothing else in the world is so important to me - to my own inner self - as writing is.”
Rose’s European phase cast a whole new light on my favorite essay from Laura’s Missouri Ruralist column, which can be found in Little House in the Ozarks. The essay is called “Are You Your Children’s Confidant?”
“A letter from my mother, who is seventy-six years old, lies on my desk beside a letter from my daughter far away in Europe. Reading the message from my mother, I am a child again and a longing unutterable fills my heart for Mother’s counsel, for the safe haven of her protection . . . But when I turn to the letter written by my daughter, who will always be a little girl to me no matter how old she grows, then I understand and appreciate my mother’s position and her feelings toward me.
“Many of us have the blessed privilege of being at the same time mother and child, able to let the one interpret the other to us until our understanding of both is full and rich. What is there in the attitude of your children toward yourself that you wish were different? Search your heart and learn if your ways toward your own mother could be improved.”
Laura of the Little House books did sometimes chaff against her mother, but her willfulness was nothing compared to Rose’s rebellion. Laura, after all, developed into a dutiful daughter, working selflessly to help pay for Mary’s schooling. Eventually, she settled down and became a proper farm wife, just like her mother. So Rose’s bohemian lifestyle must have come as quite a shock to her. Another of her essays mentions explaining Rose’s divorce to her neighbors. She seemed sympathetic to her daughter, but it couldn’t have been easy. So when Laura asks, “What is there in the attitude of your children toward yourself that you wish were different?,” she probably had a few things in mind for herself. And the tension between them was about to mount. Rose had seen Par-ee, but she had to go back to the farm anyway. She was an only child, and her parents were getting older.
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, written as a rebuttal to this book, also covers the period in which Rose returned to Rocky Ridge farm. Many fans were disappointed to learn that Laura had clay feet when it came to her relations with her daughter, but personally, I blame Rose. For example, Rose directed that a new house be built on Rocky Ridge Farm, and when it was finished, she had her parents leave the one they had built themselves and move into the new one while she moved into the old house. Now, I can see why Rose might have thought she was doing her parents a favor, but I can also understand why Laura reacted coldly to the whole project. What we think is best for our aging parents ain’t necessarily so.
One thing I do not blame Rose for, however, was the investment advice she gave her parents in 1929. The crash impoverished them all, but I don’t see that as a particular lack of foresight on Rose’s part. It happened to everybody. And then, strapped for cash, Rose advised Laura to do what she’d been doing for years: sell her writing. Laura’s first attempt was called “Pioneer Girl” and was actually meant for adults, but when one publisher suggested she turn it into a children’s story in novelized form, the Little House series was born.
As I said, it’s really hard to know for sure whether Rose was ghostwriter or editor. One quote the author uses to support his thesis is in a letter from Laura to Rose seeming to give her a free hand: “Do whatever you want with the d-n stuff. Just clean it up.” The author also cites several letters from Rose to her friends complaining about having to edit for her mother. Ironically, he comments, that work turned out to be the most important of her life, more lasting than anything that bore her own name. Her own novels, Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land, were also based on the Ingalls and Wilder pioneer heritage, though neither won literary awards or became commercial successes the way the Little House series did.
And so Laura, who initially said she was more interested in the accomplishment of writing than the money it would bring her, ended up with a steady income of royalties through the Depression. She did a whole lot better than Carrie and Grace, the former of whom wrote a letter to Laura asking for any cast-off clothes she might have to give away and the latter of whom was receiving some form of New Deal public assistance. As I think I said in my review of Becoming Laura Ingalls, the parallels between the hardships of pioneering and the hardships of the Depression, i.e. past and present for the author, never cease to fascinate me.
And this brings me to the political and economic values taught in the books, clearest in Farmer Boy, but definitely present in everything from By the Shores of Silver Lake onward. Rose, along with Ayn Rand, was a leading voice for libertarianism. The Little House series does have some definite libertarian elements, particularly in The Long Winter (see quotes here) and in this passage of Little Town on The Prairie, which the appendix cites as one of Rose’s additions:
“Suddenly [Laura] had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind and she thought: God is America's king. Americans won't obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. . . . Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. ‘Our father's God, author of liberty.’ The laws of Nature and of Nature's God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God's law is the only thing that gives you the right to be free.”
The appendix also notes a significant libertarian omission: Rose cut the sentence that reveals that Mary’s education at the College for the Blind was government-sponsored. All the money that Laura earned went for train fare, clothing, and other incidentals, not tuition.
All of this begs the question of how much of the books came from Rose’s influence and how much her views converged with her mother’s. Laura also opposed the New Deal, though it seems rather uncharitable to me; most of America didn’t have the benefit of royalties.
After Laura’s death, Rose spent more time on political activism than writing, and in many ways, this was the most interesting part of the book. Roger MacBride, who would later run for president under the libertarian ticket, became Rose’s “adopted grandson.” He also became her heir and eventually received the royalty income from the books. He then sold his rights and became co-producer of the TV series. What a fortune made from Rose and Laura’s efforts! It was more than either lived to see, and both had endured such poverty! But there are many ironies to Rose’s life story, not the least of which is that she etched a permanent place for her mother’s world in American consciousness even though she ran so fast and far away from it herself.
View all my reviews