Judith Thurman was interviewed on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday about her recent article on the Wilder Women. You can hear it here.
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One response to “Judith Thurman on the Wilder Women”
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I just read through the NPR interview, and the New Yorker piece that was referred to by Amy Lauters on August 5th.
I was not familiar with Ms. Thurman’s work, so I did a little research; I see she has mostly published essays on the fashion industry, as well as several books. What I found striking in her New Yorker article is that she refers to LIW as “matronly” and to RWL as a “frumpish, middle-aged divorcee”. An interesting choice of descriptive adjectives, coming from a woman who is predominately a fashion editor and was supposedly reviewing the work of two successful women writers.
In the NPR interview, Ms. Thurman acknowledges that LIW had a “little” writing career before the Little House series was launched. However, she goes on to say that the “poverty of the writing”, referring to the TFFY, shows that LIW “had a sense of the vocation but alone she could not do it.” She says that, “The writing is prissy and amateurish; the heroine is bigoted and obsessed with money”.
Actually I remember being dismayed when I read the TFFY as a child of 9 or 10. It was vastly different from the other books, and it was sad. It does not have the flow, and the warmth, of the earlier books. But now that I am older, I see that book in a different light, and not as a literary critic. I see it as a testament to the difficulties that LIW experienced as a newly married young woman, who managed to survive incidents that could have turned her into a character not unlike Ms. Brewster in THGY. It may show the more human side of Laura; things were not perfect in her life. She did have adversity, but there was little she could do in most cases to prevent it. The text is that of Laura herself, and reads more similarly to journal entry’s; who knows what type of adult book would have emerged if she had edited it and published a more polished version? Did Rose, because of her self acknowledged depression, chose to give the original series more sparkle and happiness in order to brighten her own dark days?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I agree with Amy Lauters that the Thurman material is recycled and arrogant. In fact, I felt the piece to be sensationalistic, with the addition of emotive terms to describe the family members, and limited descriptions of incidents, such as that Rose purchased a vehicle for her parents and Almanzo crashed it. She left out the fact that the experienced horseman crashed the car, not because he was too “dumb” to learn to drive, or felt that the car had no value because his daughter purchased it, but because he drove the car the way one would handle a runaway horse.
Thank you for providing the opportunity to comment on a forum that is populated by LIW enthusiasts, who objectively and compassionately explore superior questions.