Recommended New Yorker piece by Judith Thurman (author of Secrets of the Flesh, a life of Colette) on Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose.
The best book among many good, if more pedestrian, ones, "The Ghost in the Little House," by William Holtz, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, explores a controversy that first arose after Wilder bequeathed her original manuscripts to libraries in Detroit and California. It is the work of a fastidious stylist, and, in its way, a minor masterpiece of insight and research. Holtz's subject, however, isn't Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is her daughter and, he argues, her unacknowledged "ghost," Rose Wilder Lane...
What a fascinating article. I remember reading 'The First Four Years' and being disappointed by it. Whatever the relationship between Laura and Rose, their writing partnership worked.
Kath Langrish