Nancy Tystad Koupal (ed.)

I grazed through this, having picked it up intending to read just one chapter, “Laura Ingalls Wilder as a Midwestern Pioneer Girl” by John E. Miller (one of my college history professors).

Miller's essay is more about geography than literature, incorporating Dakota into the historical narrative spelled out in Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World (2017) by Robert Kaplan, and nearly as challenging to any non-conservative reader. (The book is deliciously typeset, unlike Kaplan's.)

Miller puts a lot of effort into bolstering LIW's literary cred, comparing her favorably with Willa Cather, and her artistic cred, comparing her favorably with Harvey Dunn.

These are rather superficial comparisons, like comparing firewood with buffalo chips. However the chips may fall, the agrarian and pastoral myths continue to enflame the exuberance of libertarian folks who retain their homesteads in Dakota.… (lisätietoja)

Pioneer Girl Perspectives, published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press as part of its Pioneer Girl Project on the 150 anniversary year of Laura's birth, contains Laura's speech at the Detroit Book Fair in 1937, essays by nine literary scholars on some aspect of Laura's life, career and lasting impact on children's literature, and an interview with a lawyer representing the Little House Heritage Trust. The Press had published Pioneer Girl, the Annotated Autobiography edited by Pamela Smith Hill in 2014, which went through eight printings of more than 150,000 copies within a year of publication (pp. 2-3). Many of the essay authors referred to this publication in their essays.

All of the essays are scholarly and heavily footnoted but very interesting. I particularly appreciated having the notes as footnotes instead of endnotes; they were readily accessible being at the bottom of the pages. The scholars did not always agree on specifics concerning Laura Ingalls Wilder and/or her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. For example, two essays heavily featured Rose Wilder Lane and expressed very different ideas about her, showing her dishonesty as a writer in the yellow journalism pattern in a negative essay versus portraying her as an accomplished author in a positive essay.

The essay authors apparently read each others’ contributions; several times in footnotes they referred to another essay in the book.

The topics covered in the essays include but are not limited to: (1) the controversy concerning the authorship of the Little House books, i.e. the roles of Laura and Rose, (2) a history of the scholarship concerning these books, Laura’s unpublished autobiography, and of the 2014 publication of the annotated autobiography, (3) the content of the Little House books, and (4) the Laura's views concerning women’s rights. I feel that the essay “Women’s Place” by Paula M. Nelson deals too much with a history of women’s suffrage in America (including what occurred before Laura was born).

Unfortunately, the book ended rather abruptly; I'm disappointed the editor did not close with an ending statement of some kind. She wrote an introduction, but a postscript would have made a more unified work.

Includes brief biographical sketches of the contributors and an index.

Highly recommended.… (lisätietoja)