The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES) [Paperback]

William Holtz (Author)

Book Description

Series: MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES | Publication Date: April 1, 1995

"Drawing on diaries and letters, Holtz . . . details Lane's life (1886-1968) in an engrossing study that highlights her troubled relationship with an apparently cold and manipulative mother."--Publishers Weekly. Illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Do anything you please with the damn stuff if you will fix it up," said Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series, to her daughter Rose, who, according to Holtz's startling research, was the de facto author of her mother's books. Drawing on diaries and letters, Holtz, a professor of English at the University of Missouri, details Lane's life (1886-1968) in an engrossing study that highlights her troubled relationship with an apparently cold and manipulative mother. At 17, she fled her parents' farm in Missouri, married (and later divorced) Gillette Lane, and then traversed the globe, supporting herself as a journalist in New York, Baghdad and Albania, making friends with such writers as Floyd Dell and Dorothy Thompson. Guilt drove her back to the farm to help her parents until publication of the Little House series, under her mother's name--but heavily rewritten and edited by Rose--freed her financially. A believer in rugged individualism, Lane's treatise The Discovery of Freedom became the Bible of the Libertarian Party. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Fans of the "Little House on the Prairie" series, which fictionalizes the life of the author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, may be disappointed to discover that her works were actually ghostwritten by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968). Thus asserts this well-researched study by Holtz (English, Univ. of Missouri-Columbia). Rose was a precocious girl with a flair for writing who found her mother to be puritanical and critical. This biography details Rose's forays into the world as she attempted to launch her own writing career. She experienced limited commercial success but often found herself financially and emotionally strained, especially in view of the demands of her parents. Rose injected her own populist ideas into her mother's work as she crafted her mother's rudimentary writings into the readable books that are still popular today. The tenuous relationship between mother and daughter offers additional interest in this book. Recommended for public libraries.
- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri (April 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826210155
• ISBN-13: 978-0826210159
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #765,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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61 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Thoughts and Feelings, December 10, 2005

By 

Laura M. Ingram (Virginia, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES) (Paperback)

There are some things I like very much about this book. It's well-written, full of the details that make a potentially dry literary biography more palatable (how did she live, what did she read, who were her friends, where did she travel), and its narrative successfuly manages to balance points of intellectual and human interest about an author who, whether deservedly or undeservedly, has been something of a forgotten figure in the history of American letters.

However, I couldn't finish the book without feeling, repeatedly, that the author spared no opportunity to take potshots at the person he feels unfairly overshadowed the legacy of Rose Wilder Lane--that is, her mother--without offering sufficient textual support. In the interest of some brevity, I will use only one example: the incident with Rose's dog after she had left the Rocky Ridge farmhouse and was working on the book about Missouri (and her mother was taking back control of the farm). The book states that LWI had the dog killed, but provides no context for the incident--just drops the fact in the text like a bomb. This is a particularly prejudicial detail that should have been handled more responsibly--that is, explained better or left out completely. Did she have it done out of spite? Because she didn't want to take care of it? Did it attack someone? Or was the dog sick and it was the humane thing to do? Whatever the truth is, it is the kind of detail that says a lot about the people involved, but it feels like Mr. Holz uses is simply as a quick, value-laden detail that would underscore how bad of a mother he thinks LIW was. "Oh yeah--and if all I've already mentioned wasn't enough to convince you, she went and had her daughter's dog killed, too."

("I'll get you my pretty--you and your little dog, too.")

And in this scholarly book, unfortunately, Mr. Holtz's criticism of LIW as a mother doesn't read like startling new factual information--it reads like gossip. And like most gossip, it feels incredibly one-sided. I have read in other sources correspondence between the two that lends itself at times to more positive interpretations of their complicated relationship. But Mr. Holtz doesn't use or even acknowledge that the relationship between RWL and LWI wasn't all or always bad. This makes it harder to accept the authority of his scholarship in regards to the negative information. I don't doubt it exists, but I want more context--the bigger picture--not nasty little asides that ascribe to LIW all of Rose's flaws, faults and problems--from overweening guilt to sexual frigidity (or was it wantoness?) to late-onset diabetes.

I find it interesting that this book, and from what I understand, the Miller biography,(which I will admit to knowing only by reputation--I have plans to read it but haven't had the chance yet), holds the antagonism of this particular mother-daughter relationship to be so extreme, unique and surprising. I think a certain degree of antagonism between mothers and daughters--complete with outright occasional nastiness between the two, no matter how good the relationship truly is--is far from abnormal. I think it is clear that there was something off between RWL and LWI--RWL's return to Rocky Ridge, with the banishment of her parents to the Rock House she insisted on building, and other strange behavior that occurred or is hinted at as having occurred between RWL and her parents,just seems to reflect bizarrely on all the characters involved--but I don't think this book makes the strongest case that the fault was primarily the mother's.

There is one anecdote that truly disturbed me--the one concerning Laura's fall not long before her death and Rose's complete refusal to give her assistance. So what if her mother was penny-pinching, needy, passive-agressive, judgmental? If her parents didn't beat her, if the poverty, malnutrition and humiliation of her upbringing was the result of poverty and personal tragedy that couldn't be overcome despite bone-breaking work, what reason did she have to be so bitter she couldn't be bothered to help her 80+ year old mother up in front of friends at a restaurant after a humiliating fall? I agree with Mr. Holtz--it is a telling anecdote--but the person it casts a bad light on is RWL, not LIW.

Her childhood may have been bad, but let's be honest--she was no Frank McCourt. And at one point she even seems to acknowlege that there were children worse off at the Mansfield school than she was. Her real problem is that she was intelligent, sensitive, and precocious enough to care and yearn for more--that's what sets her apart from the thousands, probably millions of children whose lives were exactly like hers.

One last thing--I also think that Mr. Holtz over-emphasizes the revelatory impact that the discovery that LIW may not have written every single word of her books, or that every detail of the books did not happen as they are written, will have. At the heart of the books, and what makes them so enduring, is the stark beauty of story that was being told--the "heart-truth" of the stories--which was overwhelmingly based upon fact--the life LIW really did live. Even if Rose "ghosted" the books--the evidence presented is interesting but not totally convincing, and I have to say that one particular scene used as an example--the Fourth of July speech in De Smet, is one I've usually skipped over (and RWL should have known, considering her experience with socialist and communist ideologies, that "party" driven fiction kills a story)--it's an example, I think, that makes the writing weaker--BUT DOES IT REALLY MATTER? Even if RWL did provide most of the finished text, I find it ironic that the strongest character she could ever be said to have created is so inextricably linked to her mother. Maybe that's why she deflected any attempt to pin the actual "authorship" of the Little House books on her.

One final question--if Roger MacBride and his wife knew and loved RLW so well, and if she despised and felt controlled by her mother so completely, and hated her childhood home so passionately--why would they choose to inter Rose's ashes with her parents at Rocky Ridge when she had left instructions which clearly indicated they could do with her remains as they pleased? Would that have not been the ultimate betrayal? The last, complete failure to escape her mother's influence? A real tragedy, if true?

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but it could have been better, February 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES) (Paperback)

The only lengthy biography of Laura's daughter, this book details the fascinating life of Rose Wilder Lane. Rose was a very different personality than her mother, but she lived an equally interesting life. What this book is best known for is the claim that Rose not only edited the Little House books for her mother, but basically ghost wrote them. It is true that this is the first book to draw major attention to the fact that Rose helped her mother with the books.But it is not accurate to state that she edited them so much they were her own work. If you read Rose's fiction, then you read the Little House books, you can see she wrote in a different style than Laura. Reading a collection of Laura's earlier farm newspaper writings, you can see that Laura did have writing ability. Rose was much more familiar with the world of professional writing than Laura was. Certainly, she did help Laura, but this book overstates things.
Perhaps the truth is that Rose was a better editor than a writer.Most people would much rather read the Little House books than Rose's stories like ''Innocence'' and ''Autumn''. A better view of the collaboration of Laura and her daughter is in Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder by John Miller. But this book is worthwhile to read if you want the story of Rose's life independent of that of her mother.I am distantly related(through her father's relatives) to Laura, and thus to Rose.

73 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ghost? More like editor..., January 17, 2000

By 

KC "KC" (CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES) (Paperback)

I thought I would give this book a 'second chance' so I am slogging through it again. I won't deny that Rose Wilder Lane was a complex person, BUT I really don't think that Laura Ingalls Wilder was as much an untalented ogre as this book would have us believe. I do believe that Rose was a terrific EDITOR, but I don't believe that she 'wrote' Laura's books, or that Laura couldn't write. There is plenty of evidence out there that Laura was a very adept writer. For instance, her columns and articles for the Missouri Ruralist (Rose was off in Albania at the time Laura wrote most of these, so how could she have had a hand in them? ); Laura's beautifully descriptive letters to Almanzo in "West from Home" (WHY would Rose have to write Laura's personal letters for her?). Further, as a reviewer below stated, Rose's own published works, aside from her short stories, leave much to be desired.

As far as her personal life, Rose seems to have been a very depressed person who was seldom happy in her life, and blamed it on her mother. A better book, I think, is "Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder" by John Miller - better written and far more enlighting, in my opinion!