I grew up with the Little House books. In fact, I attribute much of my love of reading to the time I spent with Laura and her family as they endured the harshness of life on the prairie. This book is the story of Laura‘s daughter, Rose, who spent her life of “determined ordinariness“ under the shadow of her famous mother. “A Rose in December was much rarer than a rose in June, and must be paid for accordingly.” These words written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about the birth of her daughter Rose on December 5, 1886, set the tone for Rose Wilder Lane’s emotionally crippling childhood about which she wrote, “I hated everything and everybody in my childhood.” After reading the story of her life and about the influence of her mother, I can only conclude that they deserved each other!

The family moved from hard times in South Dakota to even harder times in Southwest Missouri when Rose was a young child. She spent her formative years in the unrelieved poverty of a “country girl” who wore shabby clothes to school and ate butterless bread for lunch. She may have been poor, but she was so precocious that she suffered from writer’s cramp while still in Kindergarten. She was a real challenge to her teachers and was mostly self-taught from the books that opened up the ways of the world and became her companions throughout her life as a lifelong learner.

Rose was a world traveler who made many “little homes” away from her home turf of Rocky Ridge which she relied on as a place to recharge her batteries and bolster her income. She learned that she wasn’t wife material after a brief marriage and a stillborn son. Hpwever, her motherly instincts were aroused and she “adopted” three young men in her mid-years, giving them financial and emotional support. She was a generous person yet her generosity came with conditions and some unhappy results including the depression that plagued her much of her life.

It was interesting to me that Rose and her more famous mother began their writing careers around the same time. Rose wrote quite a few books in her lifetime but none gained the popularity of The Little House series. Laura’s stories were written in a simple random style of memories jotted down and given to Rose for revision. There was much resentment from both mother and daughter about putting Laura’s “music” into Rose’s words yet the bond was strong and Rose was at Mama Bess’s bedside when she died at age 90. Rose continued with her active life immersing herself in politics, even serving as a war correspondent in Vietnam at age 79. She was on the verge of a grand European tour when she died in her sleep at the home of friends in Connecticut at age 81.

That’s the condensed version of the life of Rose Wilder Lane. William Holtz does a commendable job of providing the many details from her letters and diaries to make her fascinating life into a fascinating book. I’m glad the author was able to get her out from under her mother’s shadow so we can read about Rose’s mark on the big world beyond the little house in Missouri. ( )

I have heard stories in the past about how Rose Wilder Lane "actually" wrote the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but nothing about Rose ever compelled me to look into it further. I had watched the TV show, but never read the books, so it didn't really matter to me. Then this book was chosen for the LibraryThing Missouri Readers group read, and I cringed at reading 400 pages about who wrote the Little House books.

That was not what this book was about.

Rose Wilder Lane was a fascinating person in her own right. The author's conclusion is that yes, she did some major editing of the Little House books. But aside from that, she was one of those women of the early 20th century who lived such interesting lives, and did some amazing things. She spent time living in Albania, she supported several children not her own, she built houses for herself and her parents. I don't know that she was a particularly likeable person, and she was extremely opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal (to the point where she refused ration cards during World War II and insisted on living off her own land). The more I read about these women, the less revolutionary the feminist movement seems to me. Feminism may have broken the boundaries set in the 40s and 50s, but the opportunities the women had who came of age earlier in the century just boggles my mind. She had no trouble making her opinions known, and I would be interested in reading some of her books. I may even read the Little House books!

Holtz had a habit of getting a little verbose occasionally, and I didn't care for Rose, but it was a good story about an interesting time in Missouri (and American) history. ( )

First things: the writing in this biography is exceptional. After reading (no--plowing through) more biographies than I care to remember written by people who evidently think "anyone" can write a biography, this one is a dream.

RWL was a fascinating woman, and she had a complex and difficult relationship with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm sure readers of the Little House series have a certain image of the author and perhaps would rather preserve that image. If so, it's probably best not to read this book. RWL kept diaries and wrote letters that recorded her side of the relationship. "It's amazing how my mother can make me suffer," she wrote. "She made me so miserable when I was a child that I've never gotten over it. I'm morbid. I'm all raw nerves. I know I should be more robust. I shouldn't let her torture me this way and always gain her own ends, through implications that she hardly knows she's using. But I can't help it."

The fact (yes, fact) that Rose worked to get her mother's manuscripts into publishable shape, the fact that her mother so resented her for doing it yet needed her to do it, the fact that working on the Little House books kept Rose from working on her own writing, the fact that the Little House books under her mother's name were wildly successful while Rose struggled with her own writing--all of that makes the difficult relationship between Rose and her mother all the more poignant.

I give this book a 5-star review, but looking back at the notes I made while reading it, I'm remembering that I did have problems in places with the biographer. For example:

The biographer doesn't seem to be very interested in several of Lane's friends: Helen Boylston (he dismisses her enormous success as a young adult fiction writer with only one line); Bessie Beatty, a real eccentric who I was hoping to learn more about; Mary Margaret McBride (another eccentric, fascinating woman; I had the impression while reading the biog that Holtz either didn't know much about her or didn't care).

I don't think Holtz understood the toxic narcissism of Lane's mother--what it took out of Lane to maintain a relationship with her, even after Lane moved to Connecticut, to return to the farm to care for her during her mother's last illness. I also don't think the biographer had much of a sympathetic understanding of Lane's depression, which was a central component to much of her adult life.

I wish Holtz had had more to say about Laura Ingalls Wilder's will. Evidently the library in Mansfield, MO was the recipient of the copyright and income from the Little House books. Really?

In the main, however, this is an excellent biography, and Lane is fortunate in her biographer.

Holtz also published a collection of letters between Rose and Dorothy Thompson which makes fascinating reading. I do wish he had published a general edition of her correspondence, since he believes (and the letters bear this out) that Lane was one of the 20th century's great letter-writers, "incapable of writing a dull line." ( )

I have long loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, her stories and her history so was anxious to read this book. However, the book was a vast disappointment, rose Wilder Lane came across as an incredibly self-centered ingrate who had loose morals and a fixation with scheming for money. The historical details were boring, something history does not need to be if presented properly. As far as I'm concerned this one is better off left on the shelf. ( )

I was an English teacher for forty-five years, but from sixth grade on, I had been sure I wanted to be a history teacher. When I reached college, it took two terrible history professors and one superb English teacher to dissuade me. You might keep this in mind as you read my next few comments.

Literary biography may tell a story that’s at least as interesting as most works of literature themselves, sometimes even more so. Now how can that be? Political leaders, war heroes, adventurers and explorers — one might expect their lives to be suspenseful, even harrowing, and important because of the role they played. But writers? What can be exciting about writing?

John Keats lived only twenty-six years, and produced most of his masterpieces in one amazing year, or thereabouts. Yet I have five full-length biographies of him, and all of them are commendable. I have four books telling stories of the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron — poet, lover, rebel, traveler, militant, ne’er-do-well — and each one of them tells a different story. If I understand Byron, perhaps they are all equally true, even when they disagree. As much as I admire the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott, I am glad that their literary works do not extend to two volumes each; however, I have read two-volume biographies of both of them without any hesitation. Peter Ackroyd’s novels strike me as so-so, but he has done justice to the biographies of Blake, Dickens, Thomas More, and T. S. Eliot, and they all read like — well, yes — novels. Very little is known about the facts of William Shakespeare’s (or Shakspere’s) life, not even for certain the spelling of his name. Yet I have just read two biographies and found them both fascinating — not convincing, but fascinating. One of them sees Shakespeare as the Earl of Oxford (and the actor Will Shakspere as another, barely literate contemporary); the other sees Shakespeare as a devoted Catholic, or at least a member of a devout Catholic family. Both overstate their case. I have never been able to make it all the way through one of Caroline Gordon’s works; yet I found Anne Waldron’s biography Close Connections to be a splendid story of a person, a marriage (to poet/critic Allen Tate) and divorce, a group (the Fugitives, some of whom ultimately became the New Critics), a region, and a period of literary history.

Sometimes, whether you know the writer’s works or not, you may find the story of her life engrossing. Take for example, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz (U of Missouri P, c1993). I know the biographer personally; he is a scholar in eighteenth-century British literature. So who is Rose Wilder Lane, and how did he get so interested in her?

Though Lane spent a long lifetime as a free-lance writer, I personally know of only two of her works. The first, the one that brought her to my attention, is a little novel that was first published serially in The Saturday Evening Post. It had been written under the title “Courage,” but it was retitled Let the Hurricane Roar. Ironically, given the title, it deals with surviving a bitter blizzard in the Midwest. The title comes from a hymn sung by the family in the story. Ultimately it was published in book form by Longman’s, who called it their first “junior novel,” a forerunner of adolescent fiction that eventually would lead to such works as Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer, Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod and Crash Club, and S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Because it dealt with a young pioneer couple facing hardships early in their marriage, when it was made into a Hollywood movie, it was retitled once again, The Young Pioneers. It’s a fine little novel, but the only one of its kind by this author and clearly not of the stature to earn her a lasting reputation.

The other work of hers that I happen to know personally is a late one: The Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework, published in 1963, when she was seventy-five years old. Herself an expert since childhood in knitting, crocheting, embroidery, and quilting, this was a labor of love for her. When I presented a signed first edition of this oversized book to my wife as a gift, she was delighted. As a needleworker herself, she immediately saw its practical and artistic value while I, of course, was pleased to have found such a rare and collectible volume.

An arch-conservative (she preferred the term “individualist”), who had supported only Herbert Hoover and Barry Goldwater with any enthusiasm, Rose Wilder Lane became known among a limited circle for a third book, entitled Discovery of Freedom, on her political philosophy.

Clearly, however, it is not her published work that makes for a fascinating biography. Her life and travels as a free-lance writer and free-wheeling woman in the early twentieth century, of course, make for interesting reading: her growing up in the Midwest and in Louisiana, her brief marriage and love affairs, her opposition to FDR’s New Deal, her personal loyalty to the country of Albania and her disappointment when it was overtaken by Communists, her efforts to support and mentor a family there, her “adoption” of a grown son, who became her heir and executor, some fairly wild claims about her life she made in her later years — all of these are interesting tidbits.

But none of these would have earned William Holtz’s commitment nor have added up to a noteworthy biography. That’s because Rose's most enduring efforts as a writer/editor earned fame not for herself, but for her mother: Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As his title suggests, Holtz argues — and convincingly — that the Little House books that became such classics among children’s literature, that became the basis for the long-running and popular television series, were “ghost-written” by Laura’s daughter Rose. Manuscripts and correspondence seem to leave little or no doubt that Holtz is correct. “Ghost-writing” may be too accusatory a term, and Rose herself staunchly defended her mother’s reputation and integrity as a writer. But what is clear is that Laura sketched the stories, which are based, at least in part, on her own memories (though some of the memories seem a bit awry); however, it was Rose who reshaped them and rewrote them in the style and voice that earned their critical approval and popular appeal. Mama Bess wrote down her memories; Rose added and modified — in other words, fictionalized — turning them into stories. At best, the two women might be seen as co-authors. Mama is the storyteller; Rose is the fiction writer.

Suddenly their personal story takes on a life of its own. The mother daughter tensions are not just typical mother-daughter tensions, but a crucial aspect of their creative process. Neither, it might be surmised, could have produced those eight Little House books without the other.

On the Way Home is their last collaboration, pieced together from notes found after Mama Bess’s death and supplemented by a prologue and epilogue attributed to Rose herself. It deals with Laura and Almanzo's struggles to make a home when Rose was a child. “I have suggested,” Holtz writes, “some of the kinds of repression Rose had to achieve to write this account of her mother’s life in the years of her own suffering childhood. It was, in fact, a resurrection of her mother for a final tribute, a last gesture by the worshipful little girl who had always tried but could never please.”

When critics, including one junior-high-school kid, began to find factual discrepancies in the stories, Rose became fervent in her defensiveness:

“. . . it has been charged that my mother’s books are fiction. They are the truth, and only the truth; every detail in them is written as my mother remembered it. . . . she added nothing and ‘fictionized’ nothing that she wrote.”

“If my mother’s books are not absolutely accurate, she will be discredited as a person and as a writer, since a great part of the value of her books is that they are ‘true stories.’”

Holtz, however, adds his own conclusion, based on his study of earlier correspondence and manuscripts: “Long past acknowledgment now were those letters in which Rose had fought out the issue with Mama Bess, insisting on levitating her mother’s mere remembered fact with the force and grace and artifice of fiction.”

Finally, the larger and more important theme of Holtz’s biography is the influence of Rose’s ideology on Mama Bess’s Little House stories: her political commitment to individualism, freedom, responsibility, optimism, hope in the face of despair. Just how relevant these cheerful versions of personal history may be to homeless children, abandoned and hungry, to inner-city children surrounded by violence, addiction, and promiscuity, to trailer-park children and welfare children and the children of migrant workers — that is another question. Whether or not Mama Bess and Rose sweetened bitter memories, the stories are sweeter than reality sometimes is.

“I am as certain as anyone can be of anything in the future,” Rose said to a friend, “that the twentieth century will end as the eighteenth did, with a great revival and resurgence of individualism.” Indeed.