Who Owns Family History, or Writing Away Guilt

The Ghost in the Little House, by William Holtz, an English professor at the University of Missouri, put me back into my more typical reading frame of mind as it is a scholarly biography of Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of "Prairie" stories fame. I never read the Little House stories, being more a Nancy Drew type of girl and when Michael Landon did the TV series, it seems quite the domesticated come-down from his exciting single life on Bonanza, so I didn't watch that either. So, I went into this book without any major preconceived notions except the obvious: Laura was the author. Wrong, Rose was.

Holtz builds this case almost day by day. If I had been clever, I would have flipped to the appendix where there are actual side by side comparisons of what Laura sent to her libraries as her longhand versions and what was published. Then the nuances would have had more an effect of a loud speaker announcement. Rose ghost wrote for many other famous contemporaries including Lowell Thomas so her credentials and publishing successes are documented. She also had columns and short serialized stories running in Ladies Home Journal, Woman's Day and other newspapers and magazines, on topics that ran the gamut from a history of American needlepoint to one of the first well articulated tracts on Libertarianism to her own recollections of farm life in Missouri.

Not only was there are ranging breadth to Rose's writing, Holtz himself has several concurrent themes to weave together and he does so in such a way as to let Rose's powerful turn of phrase reign through numerous quotations from her letters and journals. But his own writing is as strong to support the life long conflicts and compromises between daughter and mother, to connect a family's history and values to the larger American pioneering experience, to contrast those national, innate values with world events and other cultures through Rose's wanderings, and to carry these themes across personal time as Rose's ideology matures. She was eccentric, perhaps manic depressive, and starved to recreate a loving parental experience. She relived her grandparents' and parents' uprootings and relocations on a much grander, international scale, compelled by example to build and remodel house after house, always trying to create a perfect home.

This was a book where every couple of pages I glued in a post it note to highlight an especially poignant paragraph. I enjoyed one of my favorite biography games: who turns up unexpectedly. While there are many cameo appearances, I limit my citations to those "hits" from the 50 state list -- Rose's husband is described as earning his money by babbitry, and both Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson are Rose's friends.

And of all these passages I marked, I will cite only one that hit closest to home: "The scholar must acquire a taste for old book reviews, but in this case the reviews matter less for what they tell us about the books, many now forgotten, than for what they reveal about the reviewer." As I near the end of the list, I am going through my reviews and trying to sort my preferences into broad categories of "loved it, liked it or eh." I am finding that despite doing my best to use only the criterion of how well the State as place was depicted as an agent in the story, there are too many other characteristics of style and plot that I personally value. So at the end, I will do a review of the reviews ... sort of like Rose's end of the year journal entries ... to see what I accomplished and what I learned about myself in 2009.