Ghost in the Little House : A Life of Rose Wilder Lane Book

So yes, after now having skimmed over some examples of Rose Wilder Lane's pioneer themed novels such as Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land (and noticing that much of their contents in fact seems to come straight from information and details first featured and presented by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her unpublished autobiography Pioneer Girl) and also knowing from Rose Wilder Lane's letters to her parents that she often tended to rather resent them and was obviously also a bit ashamed of Laura and Almanzo being "just" farmers and enjoying and not ever really wanting to change this scenario, I do have to admit that personally, I have to very much consider William Holtz'The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane a truly horridly unbalanced and vitriolic smear campaign against Laura Ingalls Wilder specifically (with Holtz' text accusing her not only of being a neglectful and verbally abusive parent but also categorically claiming that it was NOT Laura Ingalls Wilder but actually her daughter Rose Wilder Lane who wrote the Little House on the Prairie series).

For one, while Rose Wilder Lane is at least willing to admit in her letters, diaries etc. that she is often overly sensitive, with a tendency to easily become depressed and harshly negatively inclined (similarly to her mother in fact, as both Laura and Rose do seem to strongly resemble each other with regard to this but with both also usually quite ready to admit to this volatility of sentiment and feeling), in The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, author William Holtz not only tends to massively and utterly despise Laura Ingalls Wilder on a very nasty and even deeply personal level, he also appears to think that ALL of Rose Wilder Lane's issues with and negative attitudes towards her mother are simply because Laura Ingalls Wilder is obviously (according to Holtz) to be approached as some type of an emotionally distant, verbally abusive monster and this even though Rose herself always very readily admits that both she and her mother do have complex personalities, that they too often clash and that especially Rose's over-sensitivity frequently makes huge mountains out of the proverbial molehills (that while Rose obviously did not enjoy her childhood, her parents were not ever in fact really abusive and that both Rose and her mother Laura often seemed to verbally spar because they just were too emotionally similar but with generally differing expectations and viewpoints).

And for two, with regard to Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing as a whole, while I do strongly believe that Rose Wilder Lane's editing skills are both front and centre in the Little House on the Prairie novels, considering that there are for example many to be expected and clearly shown thematic and content based parallels between Laura Ingalls Wilder's Prairie Girl and her Little House on the Prairie series (and that Rose Wilder Lane also clearly thought her mother's writing as being good enough and interesting enough to glean for her own, for Rose Wilder Lane's own frontier novel projects), I seriously doubt that Laura Ingalls Wilder did not have the necessary penmanship skills, that albeit Rose Wilder Lane more than likely did a lot of editing and trimming for the Little House on the Prairie series, the basic plot and writing were by her mother, were by Laura Ingalls Wilder. And indeed, for William Holtz to suggest otherwise is at best quite ridiculous and at worst a total insult towards not only Laura Ingalls Wilder but also towards Rose Wilder Lane (since yes, William Holtz' assertions have also lead to some rather vehement written nastiness towards Rose Wilder Lane, as some reviewers seem to think that she had personally asked William Holtz to pen The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane as a deliberate attempt to make her mother, to make Laura Ingalls Wilder look like an abusive harridan with no writing skills and no literary talents).