Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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?

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.

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!

"The Ghost in the Little House" was a poorly written book with, what seemed to me, a clear agenda: To restore Rose Wilder Lane to her rightful literary position, and to dethrone Laura Ingalls Wilder as the genius behind the "Little House" books. Not content with criticizing her professionally, Mr. Holtz also portrays Laura as an indifferent mother who was directly responsible for all of Rose's problems. There was no middle ground. His interpretation of the facts was that in order to elevate Rose, we must denigrate her mother.

One scene in the book has Laura, at an advanced age, falling to the ground and struggling to get up while Rose merely watched in silence, never extending a hand to help her mother. I think we were supposed to see this as an indication of how poor a mother Laura had been, but it simply made Rose seem heartless.

Certainly there are two sides to every story especially in as complex a relationship as mother and daughter, but Mr.Holtz doesn't give Laura's side any hearing. He interprets Rose's stream of conciousness scribbles and bitter diary entries as meaning that Laura was a bad mother, though Rose never says any such thing. Never mind that these notes were never meant for publication or even to be seen by anyone besides Rose herself. Never mind that we've all had moments in which we may have seen our childhood or our parents in a dim light. Mr.Holtz takes a number of small facts and embroiders them to prove his point. Rose was Great, Laura was Small. Rose was talented, Laura was not. Why is it that in order to praise Rose he felt he must insult Laura?

As for his theory regarding the writership of the books, the evidence is thin indeed. His dismissal of Laura's other writings as "prosaic" offended me, as I found her letters in "West From Home" and her essays in "Little House Sampler" to be delightful. Additionally, his appendix in which he compares Laura's version of the books to Rose's ignores one vital point. Who is to say that every comma and period in the books that aren't in Laura's orange notebooks was written by Rose? Did no other editor touch the manuscript? Are there, perhaps, interim versions of the books that haven't been found? The way the appendix was set up, you'd think it had been proved conclusively that everything in the final version of the books was Rose's doing, though he supplies no evidence supporting this. He simply compares Laura's first drafts with the published version.

Mr. Holtz completely ignores the fact that "Let the Hurricane Roar," which describes many events that are also in the "Little House" books, lacks the vivid detail and lively characterization of the "Little House" books. If indeed Rose is the genius behind the books, this should be clear from reading the things she penned under her own name. It is not. So it seems clear that even if everything this man says is true, and the "Little House" books wouldn't be with they are without the participation of Rose Wilder Lane, it seems equally clear that they wouldn't be what they are without Laura Ingalls Wilder.

If you are interested in this book, you have probably already read quite a bit of LIW. I, like many I know, read everything I could that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote (even one or two poems written when she was still Laura Ingalls), including articles and letters that found their way into anthologies, everything I could find that Rose wrote, and as much as I could about them.

It's easy to accept that Rose edited. It's impossible to believe she re-wrote, which is quite a different thing. Their voices are very different. "On the Way Home" and LIW's farming articles still sound like Laura--does Holtz expect us to believe Rose fixed her mother's diaries as well--and rewrote, from Albania, the articles in the Missouri Ruralist?

He attaches way to much importance to easily disputed minutia. We are supposed to be horrified that LIW's last letter to her daughter was signed lovingly ("Mama Bess) followed by formally (Laura Ingalls Wilder.) However, in Little Town on the Prairie, Caroline (Laura's mother, a good guy) signs her daugher's autograph book in much the same way. This was simply a result of Laura's being from a much more formal time than Holtz's.

IF two different types of signatures was truly an indication of coldness and IF Rose was the author of the Little House books, she would have made sure that didn't get into Little Town on the Prairie!

Holtz maintains that a letter wherein Laura wrote something to the effect of "do anything you want with the damn thing, just fix it up" means Rose is the author. As a published author who also has friends and family, I recognize a reckless statement when I see one. Laura no more intended Rose to be the author of her books than she intended strangers from future generations to know that she sometimes employed the word "damn." It was a reckless and personal statement, not literary harbinger.

And what's with refering to Mary, every time but in the index, as "Blind Aunt Mary"? Does an intelligent and non-biased writer need to constantly refer to someone by a disability? This is simply not a nice person.

It seems Holtz wanted to elevate RWL and couldn't without denigrating LIW, in the manner of the school bully.

So much research used so personally makes an uneven if important book.

From what I have read about the Ingalls and Wilder families, I believe I can safely say that Rose Wilder Lane would be extremely upset about this book. Her personal diaries and letters were never meant for public eyes; she would have never allowed anyone to criticize her mother, ever, about anything. It is so obvious that this woman suffered greatly from manic depression, gifted as she was, and this condition affected her personal life and writing success in a negative fashion. Rose would have never agreed that she was a co-author of her mother's books; she would have denied that possibility to the end. This book is a well-written work and well-intended(to elevate RWL's very minor status as a serious novelist), but the subject must be considered. Laura Ingalls Wilder may not have understood her daughter very well, but she was not an emotional "Mommie Dearest." Laura was brought up to be frugal, demure, almost impossibly strong. Success was to be found in farming, in owning acres upon acres of productive land. It was natural for Laura to attempt to impose her same upbringing upon her daughter (is Caroline Ingalls some sort of monster, then?). Imagine how alarmed Laura was when Rose left Mansfield for the big city. How did Laura feel when Rose married a man who could barely support her at times? Maybe Laura and Almanzo were still trying to teach their daughter financial responsibility throughout her life and theirs (Rose admitted as much at one point). What about Rose's failed marriage--wouldn't Laura have felt that she was somehow to blame for that, indirectly? Divorce was a terrible stigma in that time and place. Rose's inability to settle down, her scattered goals, her attitudes, her unusual friendships--Laura tolerated these, but she was dealing with a whole new world, an unfamiliar society that she wasn't ready to accept yet. Rose was decidedly unconventional, while Laura was the opposite. Despite this, both women got along in their own ways. That was enough.
Again, Holtz has written an impressive work, but he would have been shot down long ago if Rose were still alive. No one would be allowed to take potshots at Mama Bess, who once played games with toes and dolls and gave in to whims when it came to dress styles--and loved her misguided daughter, allowing her almost abnormal control over many aspects of her own life.

Many of the previous reviewers seem to have expected The Ghost in the Little House to be a bit of fluff confirming their own preconceived notions about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose. I was expecting a scholarly work and wasn't disappointed.

Rose was an eccentric character all of her life, and I believe Laura was too. Their relationship was difficult at best, yet they were clearly bound to each other.

As a writer, Laura was able to write nonfiction beautifully, but was limited by her insistence on writing "the truth." Rose, on the other hand, was a fiction writer. Their collaboration was unique, which is why their books are classics.

As for Laura's character, Holtz was writing about Rose and seeing Laura from Rose's always self-absorbed point of view. Almanzo isn't mentioned much in the book because Rose's relationship with her mother, not Almanzo, was one of the major forces in making her the woman she was.

I don't think I would have liked Rose much, nor would she have liked me for that matter, but I find her a fascinating person and this book, rather than boring me, held my attention throughout.

Like a lot of folks, I grew up on the "Little House" books. I still have my cherished copies from grade school, and always look forward to cracking them open every few years. So, when I saw this book listed in my local library, I checked it out with an eager heart.

I'm glad that I can return it.

This has to be one of the driest books that I've ever read. It reads more like a doctoral thesis than the biography of a relatively unsung literary figure. Chapter Seven's "The Road to Baghdad" took longer for me to read than it probably did Rose to make the actual trip. I found the sections dealing with her actual writing after returning from Albania to be the most interesting (especially Ch. 12, "Courage", and Ch. 13,"Credo"). In these, we really get to see Rose doing what she does best--editing her mother's work and crafting her own stories--as well as seeing the development of early libertarian philosophy.

Holtz's obsession with mintuae practically doubled the size of the book. Do we really need to know the intimate details of Rose's spending habits and subsequent complaints of poverty? Does hearing about her money problems in EVERY single chapter make for good storytelling?

Plus, the constant repetiton of the "Wandering Jew" motif rapidly became tedious. Okay...Rose wanted to live forever so she could witness the evolution of humanity...we get the picture, so knock it off.

I think the subject would have been far better served if Professor Holtz had just compiled the original articles and correspondence into book form and provided annotation when needed.

There are a few points that should be made before one reads this book, in my opinion.
1.)Holtz just doesn't understand the complexities of the Mother-Daughter relationship! When I read this book, I felt that Rose had enormous love and respect for her mother, they were just two strong and opinionated women from different eras.
2.)Some of the exasperated comments that Rose made about her mother were made in a diary, therefore not intended for anyone else but Rose. She was venting! Where else can a person do this? Does this mean she felt the same the next day? I have kept a journal and let me tell you, sometimes I have read a few passages later and wondered "was this REALLY what I thought?"
3.) Sounds to me like Rose and Laura contributed equally to the Little House books. Laura was a good writer with a fantastic memory and a sense of humor. She aquired keen descriptive powers as a young girl, when she was asked by her father to be her blind sister Mary's eyes. One can tell that the person who wrote these stories lived that life and thought those thoughts. But I do believe Rose added her brand of warmth to the stories; if you read some of Rose's work you can tell what her contribution was. It's just too bad that Rose herself didn't want to be credited at all because she didn't want to be pegged as a "Children's book writer." I got the impression that Rose was much harder on herself than she should have been for her supposed "Failure" to write something "GREAT."
She was a complex, brilliant woman, way ahead of her time.
Although I don't agree with some of Holtz's opinions or assessments, Rose is such a fascinating subject and this book is well-written, so I gave it 4 stars.

When I finished this book (after, admittedly, skimming the more dense and boring sections), I was left with a feeling of great pity for Rose Wilder Lane, not the impression that I am sure Prof. Holtz was aiming to create. Taken altogether, Rose's life appears to have been marked by recurring depression, tension in her relationship with her mother, persistent money troubles, failed personal relationships, and a sense of never living up to what she was capable of achieving. The mother-daughter relationship was very shallowly explored, leaving the reader to wonder why on earth Rose would resent and even hate such a wonderful "Mama Bess." The competition between the two women was suggested but not examined in great enough depth. I think this was a very serious mistake because, on the one hand, Prof. Holtz wanted to maintain that many of Rose's difficulties were caused by her "mother problem," but on the other, he did not offer enough evidence to prove that this was so. The book is worth reading, however, because of the dimension it adds to the picture of Laura, who must have felt more or less constantly at a loss about how to deal with her strange daughter.