SOURCE: Martin, Abigail Ann. “Bess Streeter Aldrich.” In Bess Streeter Aldrich, pp. 5-41. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1992.

[In the following essay, Martin provides a critical discussion of Aldrich's major works.]

“Nebraska,” wrote Bess Streeter Aldrich, “is only the state of my adoption, but I am sure that I feel all the loyalty for it which the native-born bears … while I am not a native Nebraskan, the blood of the midwestern pioneer runs in my veins and I come rightly by my love for the Nebraska pioneer and admiration for the courage and fortitude which he displayed in the early days of the state's history …” (Introduction to The Rim of the Prairie).

Certainly both love and admiration are apparent in Aldrich's finest work, A Lantern in Her Hand (1928). This novel alone is enough to give her a place among distinguished writers of the American West. Her feeling for—and appreciation of—the Midwest shine out in much of her other fiction, but primarily it is for Lantern that she is to be honored. Few other writers have presented so detailed and vivid a picture of pioneer life.

Born on 17 February 1881, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, she was the daughter of James Wareham and Mary Anderson Streeter. Her childhood as the youngest of a large and lively family was a happy one, and during her impressionable years she was imbued with the values and mores of small-town life, values and mores which greatly influenced her writing. From her numerous aunts and uncles she often heard tales of life in pioneering days, for both her parents had, in their youth, come to Iowa from “the East.” Her parental grandfather, Zimri Streeter, had been a member of the Iowa Territorial Legislature, his salty character making him a prominent figure among his colleagues.

Educated in the public schools of Cedar Falls, she went on to Iowa State Teachers College in the same town, graduating in 1901. For five years she taught primary grades in Boone and Marshalltown, Iowa, and in Salt Lake City, Utah, and for a short time she was assistant supervisor of the primary training school at Iowa State Teachers College.

In September 1907 she married Charles S. Aldrich, banker and attorney of Tipton, Iowa, where the couple lived until after the birth of their first child, Mary Eleanor, in 1909, when the family moved to Elmwood, Nebraska. Here Aldrich's husband became cashier of the American Exchange Bank, and here the three Aldrich sons were born: James, Charles, and Robert. Here too Charles Aldrich, husband and father, died suddenly on 5 May 1925. And here Aldrich's literary career began in earnest.

She had been writing from an early age. At fourteen she sold a children's story to the Chicago Record and received a five-dollar camera as a prize. At seventeen, hearing that the Baltimore News was paying five dollars for stories, she wrote a love story, received the five dollars, and promptly spent it for a black chiffon parasol!

For some years she had been producing articles for teachers' magazines, stories for young children, and a goodly number of short stories for the American Magazine and The Ladies Home Journal. Her story “The Little House Next Door” won a prize of $175 offered in 1911 by the latter magazine. Two collections of magazine stories had been published as well as a novel, The Rim of the Prairie (1925).

All this success had been pleasant, of course, but not economically necessary. Her husband's death gave her the impetus to make money, and producing fiction thus became her life work.

This work flourished in the midst of her growing children and their activities, interrupted often by household tasks and emergencies. She is quoted as answering a query about housekeeping: “Three huge meals three times a day for a girl and three boys with the largest appetites in the world. I could take a prize for patching at the county fair” (Marble 10).

Again, she remarks, “I have written with three babies tumbling over my feet, with a house of paperdolls under my desk and their five-year-old owner demonstrating a cyclone with them, with one eye on a cooking meal and the other on the story in hand, with grammar grade boys making kites and bows and arrows around me” (Marble 5).

Beginning under such conditions—and persisting—Aldrich in the end produced 160 short stories and seven novels. Some of this fiction has been serialized, syndicated, sold in England, and translated into Dutch, Danish, Hungarian, Swedish, Spanish, and French. All of her books have been published in Braille.

Aldrich's novels and stories obviously grew out of her background, her environment, her circumstances. And because they all bear the decided impress of her Midwestern life they are worth examining and evaluating. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of her fiction have regional overtones.

Near the end of her first novel, The Rim of the Prairie, she describes the way one of the characters writes of the Midwest. Here she seems to be expressing her own credo: “Warner Field writes of the mid-west. He does not credit it with having in its air either the crispness of the mountains or the salt tang of the sea … nor will he discredit the sorcery of the odors of loam and sod and subsoil, of dewy clover, and ripening corn and the honey-sweetness of lavender alfalfa. He does not pretend that it is idyllic … nor will he speak of it as bleak and uninteresting. He does not assert that it has attained to great heights of culture and art … nor will he sell it for thirty pieces of silver. But in some way Warner Field catches in his writings the gleam of the soul of the wide prairie, dim and deep and mysterious. For here, as everywhere, drama ebbs and flows like the billowing of the seas of yellow wheat” (351-52).

In the wider perspective of history, Bess Streeter Aldrich will be remembered for her pioneer fiction—four novels and several short stories that tell of the settling of the Midwest. Actually, her first real prominence as a writer came with the publication of A Lantern in Her Hand (1928). Those critics are unperceptive who say it was something of an anomaly, this novel about struggling “dirt farmers” that was published in the roaring twenties when flaming youth, bootlegging, and a kind of shrill prosperity dominated the scene. They overlook society's always undiminished interest in its beginnings, in its own local (or national) development.

This interest Aldrich exploited in ways both innocent and clever. It was innocent because, as she said somewhere, she simply wanted to honor the pioneer women who, as her own mother had, had come to a raw country, lived through appalling hardships and poverty, and had never lost their buoyancy of spirit or their sense of values.

On the other hand she was clever. She was careful to research her material meticulously, making use of bona fide records, papers, anecdotes. As a result the novel is richly detailed and true.

On the very first page of Lantern the reader is caught up in the story and senses its authenticity. More, the book is infused with Aldrich's warm admiration for the pioneers who, because of almost unbelievable labor, and in the face of devastating frustrations, disappointments, and suffering, settled one of the richest and most productive states of the union.

Her admiration is not only, or even principally, for their strength and perseverance; it is for their unfaltering courage. The note is struck in Joyce Kilmer's verse from which the novel's title is taken:

Because the road was steep and long,
And through a dark and lonely land,
God set upon my lips a song
And put a lantern in my hand.

The central figure in the book is Abbie Deal, born Mackenzie, whom the reader meets at the age of eight, just coming to Iowa from the East with her widowed mother and her brothers and sisters. The story takes Abbie swiftly through her growing-up years, her emergence as an exquisite young woman with a delightful voice and a dreamy imagination, to her courtship by sturdy Will Deal, and their marriage.

Sometime after the birth of their first child, a son, when she is pregnant with her second child, Abbie learns that Will is eager to go west to the new territory, Nebraska. By “homesteading” he can acquire a fine profitable farm. All it will require is work, and he is suited to that. For Abbie it requires more than work: it requires courage. The land they are going to is new—and lonely. There will be just a handful of people making a settlement. And these people, destined to be her only neighbors and friends, are as yet strangers. She must leave all that she cares for and venture into who knows what perils. (Childbirth will be completely without medical assistance, or even the aid of her own mother and sister.) There will be no school, no church, no stores, no newspaper.

There is as yet no house for them, of course, nor for their few animals. Shelters will have to be hastily constructed of sod, for the country has no stones for building, and for wood only such trees as grow along the small stream near which they will live.

Very little is there to protect them when the bitter winter comes, when raging winds sweep unimpeded over the prairies, and fierce snows make the country blinding and treacherous. In the summers there will be brutal heat, the sun pouring its terrible radiance down through air as clear and dry as glass. There will be crops destroyed in an hour by drought or by insects; there will be, at times, the debilitating lack of ordinary decencies: even sufficient soap, even the most rudimentary things beloved by women—fabrics for sewing, little toys for their children.

There will be moments when life will cease to be worth living, when the fatigue of each day seems to yield nothing in the way of progress or prosperity. And for a long, long time there will be overwhelming nostalgia, the craving of a tender, affectionate heart for her own people, for her familiar surroundings.

All this is shown in Aldrich's lengthy novel. As the narrative of one woman and her family in pioneer conditions, Lantern is complete.

Thus it is much more than the story of one woman. It is a piece of social history, showing how Nebraska, and in particular one town, grew through the years. Interesting statistics help give the aura of authenticity referred to above. For instance, Will Deal buys “railroad land” at $2.00 an acre in 1868, when Nebraska had been a state just under a year. The town which he and Abbie and a few other families found is located “35 miles from Nebraska City, and ten miles from Weeping Water.” At this time Omaha has a population of 15,000, and contains eleven churchs, five schools, five banks, five breweries, sixty saloons, and a hoop factory. Lincoln had just been designated the state capital, a place, Abbie says, which is “away out on the prairie with just two or three log houses.”

Abbie and Will endure a great many crises and hard times. They know what it is to have crop failures: the land is rich and good, but often rain is scanty. In an effort to increase moisture-retention, they drive to Nebraska City to get cottonwood seedlings to plant. Will never loses his faith in the land, and Abbie, worn with work and childbearing and discouragement, stands by him.

Eventually, of course, times improve, and those settlers who have “stuck it out” live to see their state flourish, with fine modern cities and universities and many cultural amenities. Abbie and Will rear children who are a credit to them: a prosperous banker, a successful lawyer, a prominent singer, a university professor. Their oldest daughter marries a physician who becomes one of Lincoln's most distinguished doctors. Through everything the two keep their love for each other and for the land.

In a way—and surely intentionally—Aldrich makes the Deals to stand as symbols of the pioneer spirit that has made her adoptive state great. Abbie is “Everywoman”—that is, the archetype of the pioneer mother whose tired and ravaged body contains the living spirit of enterprising courage and will.

Spring Came on Forever (1935), though not as sweeping in scope as Lantern, is also a graphic presentation of frontier life. Here the pioneers are German, leaving Illinois for Nebraska, enduring all the hardships of settling on a raw, untamed land. And, of course, becoming prosperous. There is the blizzard of 1888, the devastating flood of the early 1930s. There are setbacks and grim, unrelenting labor. But there is an undisturbed, a profound, feeling for the land.

The story itself is uncomplicated. Matthias Meier, a hearty young blacksmith, goes into the new land, makes his way brilliantly, and ends up wealthy and respected. As a young man he falls in love with Amalia Stolz, whose overbearing father forbids their marriage. She must become the wife of a coarse, hardworking man, and she ends up a tiny, shrivelled-up woman with very little to show for a life of pitiless toil and privation. Somehow Neal and Hazel, descendants of Matthias and Amalia, meet and fall in love. When they marry they elect to stay on the land, because the love of it is part of their lives.

The title is taken from Vachel Lindsay's poem “The Chinese Nightingale.”

Who shall end my dream's confusion?
Life is a loom, weaving illusion …
One thing I remember:
Spring came on forever …

Song of Years (1938-39) also tells of pioneer days. This long and lively tale concerns the ebullient Martin family: the father, Jeremiah; the mother, Sarah; their two sons and seven daughters; and their friends. They are early settlers in Iowa, and the story presents an excellent picture of life in the young country beginning in June 1854 and ending just after the Civil War.

The colorful detailed narrative describes the girls' love affairs (especially that of Suzanne). These are full of incident, for the Martin daughters are given to coquetry. More important, the book gives a clear picture of the impact of the Civil War on the everyday life of the little settlement. Because coffee is a dollar a pound, women try many substitutes: these range from rye, wheat, and bran mixed with molasses to sweet potatoes chipped and browned in sugar. Gold and silver suddenly disappear; “money” becomes printed paper, little slips worth ten, fifteen, twenty-five, or fifty cents. The whole is a vivid picture of the settling of the Midwest, obviously modelled on the reminiscences of Aldrich's grandparents.

Then in 1942 when the country was at war, Aldrich published a “pioneer” novel quite different from the three previously described. The Lieutenant's Lady tells of the life (full of hardships, danger—and a bit of glamour) lived by the wife of an Army officer. This is, Aldrich explains on the first page, a “fictionalized version of a real diary,” and the reader is led to see that the diary tells a complete story.

Linnie Campbell journeys from New York to Omaha in the 1860s, and Omaha, at the time the territorial capital of Nebraska, was, to put it simply, a very primitive place: “Already the young town had begun to put on airs by denying the privilege of stacking hay in the streets and passing an ordinance that any hogs found running loose were to be impounded and sold.” The fight to change Nebraska's status from territory to state is told in detail, followed by a description of the dissension over the location of the state capital. Those who wanted it out on the prairie and those who wanted it named Lincoln were finally victorious, but the struggle was long and bitter.

Linnie and Lieutenant Norman Stafford are married after some rather interesting complications, and they go to live at Fort Berthold, in Dakota Territory, and later at Camp Cook in Montana Territory. Conditions of army post living are described vividly: the loneliness, the ever-present fear of Indian uprisings, and the lack of cultural amenities. (Linnie sets up a little school for the children of personnel.)

Hardships abound (as in any pioneer living), but Linnie and Norman never lose spirit and courage and pride of country. Norman remains a career Army man all his life, and Linnie goes with him faithfully as he is moved about. In very trying circumstances they bring up four children.

The book seems to be a tribute to Army wives, as well as to the Army. Significantly, as it was brought out in 1942, Aldrich carefully confirms its timeliness: “The lieutenant's lady lived to be very old, so old that she had seen her son and two of her grandsons in the United States Army and a toddling great-grandson marching and counter-marching with a wooden gun.”

Secondary in importance among Aldrich's works are three novels that may be described as “romances,” though each is more than that. Their central figures are women who suffer—and find joy—in love. The Rim of the Prairie (1925) was the first of all the Aldrich novels; A White Bird Flying (1931) takes up the story of Abbie Deal's granddaughter; and Miss Bishop (1940), the most nearly comprehensive character portrait of all, details the long life of a college teacher. This latter book proved so popular that it was made into a movie equally appealing, Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) starring Martha Scott and Paul Muni.

Though each of these novels derives its interest from its heroine, they differ as to setting and era. In The Rim of the Prairie the reader becomes intimately acquainted with a small Midwestern town, a town full of “characters.” Many of the older people have been pioneers, have seen the town grow, and have retained memories of older, harsher times. There is a mystery to be brought to light near the end; there are emotional moments a-plenty; and, of course, there is the triumph of love over what had seemed insurmountable difficulties. The plot is rather more complicated than in any of the following Aldrich novels, and the main character, Nancy Moore, is a vivid young woman surrounded by a number of colorful people—rich and poor, old and young.

A White Bird Flying is much simpler in concept. Readers familiar with A Lantern in Her Hand find it interesting because so many of the characters are known in the earlier book. This one tells of Laura Deal, lovely, talented granddaughter of Abbie and Will. From a very early age she is close to her grandmother, and after Abbie's death she finds inspiration in her memory. Her ambition is to become a great writer, to carry out one of Abbie's cherished dreams.

The story takes her through adolescence and university years to her love for Allen Rinemiller, whose grandparents had come to the prairie country with the Deals. A great opportunity for advancement along her chosen career is offered Laura, and she is forced to choose between a glamorous future and marriage. Here, as has been noted before in Aldrich's tales, a flavor of the “early days” can be sensed; here are people linked with the past, “modern” though they may be.

The third of these romances, Miss Bishop, is notable for its strong central character. Ella Bishop is one of the most forceful women Aldrich ever created. Her story may be told in a short paragraph.

One of the thirty-two students who attend the first year of what will later be a great university, Ella dominates the situation wherever she is. Graduating, she is taken on as a member of the faculty and spends the rest of her life giving herself to others: to her students, to her friends, to her family. An ecstatic love affair is brutally ended, and Ella later resists the temptation to enter into another with a married man. All her life she keeps steadily at work, depriving herself of one pleasure after another to help various members of her family and to inspire her students. In the end she is accorded enthusiastic appreciation by the university and has acquired a wide circle of friends. There are some dramatic moments in Miss Bishop, well calculated to please the Hollywood of the early 1940s, but the main concern of the reader is the character and personality of Ella herself, as well as her impact on those about her.

A great share of Aldrich's writings may be subsumed under the heading “Small-Town Fiction.” Such periodicals as Ladies Home Journal, American Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Women's Home Companion, Delineator, and Saturday Evening Post welcomed these bright tales of “ordinary” people. Because of their popularity many were gathered into collections—six in number.

The first of these is Mother Mason (1924). All the stories here are concerned with the doings of the Mason family, including not only Tillie, the hired “help,” but also the daughter-in-law. A great many things go on in the lively Mason household. Mother feels so beset that she takes a few days off to go to the city all by herself. Her pretext is exceedingly flimsy, but it satisfies her family, and she has a wonderful (if solitary) time. Each of the three daughters encounters love and reacts characteristically. Junior, the troublesome pre-teenager, gets into an amusing scrape. Tillie decides to embark on a life of her own, only to return crestfallen a short time later. Whatever happens, the Masons never know a dull moment.

The Cutters (1926) is another collection of stories about a single family, with the focal point Nell, the young mother. Nell's marriage is happy, and her energetic children are bouncingly healthy, but she nevertheless has problems to solve and obstacles to overcome. Many of these problems and obstacles are internal: they show her seeking to come to terms with herself, to adjust her values. She is envious of an old school friend's great success in the business world; she is overawed by an older matron's complacent efficiency; she is pricked by an insistent ambition to write; she feels the strain of entertaining an enviably rich businessman and his wife. Some of Nell's experiences are sheer comedy: her entering a “contest” involving a word puzzle; her working on a gala dinner to honor a “home grown” celebrity; her decision about disciplining her two maddening small sons.

Through both these collections breathes the atmosphere of small-town middle America. In them the life of these towns during the 1920s comes vividly to life.

Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, Aldrich produced a large number of stories having to do with a variety of characters. Her locale never changes. No matter what name she gives, it is the small town she has known (and loved) all her life. Many of these stories were published in The Man Who Caught the Weather (1936), The Drum Goes Dead (1941), Journey into Christmas and Other Stories (1949), and A Bess Streeter Aldrich Reader (1950). A Bess Streeter Aldrich Treasury (1959), The Home-Coming and Other Stories (1984), and Across the Smiling Meadow and Other Stories (1984) have been brought out posthumously.

All the plots are uncomplicated. An old man keeps tabs on the weather and goes to his wife's grave to comfort her during an electrical storm. A youngish businessman has his hope for the future renewed at a Christmas celebration. All the citizens of a town join in welcoming a returning “boy who made good”—and he finds his childhood sweetheart waiting for him. Near death, a mother comes to a realization of the value of life. A middle-aged couple celebrates a wedding anniversary. Always in the end there is an upward swing: the men and women, the boys and girls, come to a greater appreciation of life—and of each other. Aldrich's endings may not be exactly “happily ever after,” but they are definitely upbeat. Her reader leaves her people contentedly, seeing them wrapped in serenity and satisfaction, or at least knowing they will somehow work things out. In these stories Aldrich has definitely caught and reproduced the American longing for security and for fun.

She has done more. As Victor P. Hass, World Herald Book Editor, says, “The core of her writings is family. She has few superiors in American writing in showing, through action, the meaning of family in human life. Her families—the Masons, the Cutters, the Moores, the Deals—were complete. They, and thousands like them, were intensely important because they were the foundation on which the American Dream was built”.

Children play important parts in Aldrich's family stories, and it is obvious that she is fond of them. We have seen that she worked with her very lively sons and daughter around her. (When he was small, her youngest, Robert, thought that all mothers wrote.) They and their activities formed a very important part of her everyday life. So it is not surprising that some of her best and most amusing remarks concern boys and girls.

Consider, for instance, small Jakie Cohen in Rim of the Prairie: “Because of his great curiosity over a firecracker,” he is “the possessor of a glass eye which he would remove for the edification and entertainment of anyone who paid him a cent.” Or observe Nell Cutter's skirmish with her obstreperous sons as they put off feeding their rabbits.

As all popular authors are, she was frequently asked to write articles or give statements concerning her philosophy of creative writing, her methods, etc. Her answers were never ambiguous: the reader is left in no doubt as to what she was trying to accomplish and why.

Discussing A Lantern in Her Hand she observes that though it was written in the “roaring 20's” it was far from “sophisticated,” seemingly apart from the flamboyant life of the times. And she adds, “That it has made new friends each year since that day might be a bit of a lesson for young writers: Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart” (Italics hers; “The Story behind A Lantern in Her Hand” 241).

When it comes to writing of life in a modern setting, she has very clear convictions, convictions which any of her readers may see are amply illustrated by her work: “In regard to the modern novel being a true mirror of the American home, the trend, of course, has been to write of the fast, high-strung, disintegrating home. That type of home is as American as the type I write about, but no more so. It no more represents all of America than does my type. But it is heard from far more than the type that I represent. After all, there are not very many of us who are writing of the small-town, financially-comfortable, one-man-for-one-woman, clean, decent and law-abiding families. As stories call for something dramatic, I suppose the idea is that there isn't much drama in that sort of family. But there is birth there, and love and marriage and death and all the ups-and-downs which come to every family in every town, large or small” (Marble 3).

She goes on to say, “If you have lived life deeply, touched bottom, as it were, it takes away any inclination to sit and wade through pages of sex stuff, or even wearily to follow somebody's ponderous mental reactions. They call it real life; at least, if it's decent, it's bunk. Are indecency and slime all that constitute real life?” (Marble 13).

One notes here what is obviously one of Aldrich's most deeply rooted convictions: “clean and decent” are divorced from “sex stuff”; furthermore, anything not “law-abiding” or “one-man-for-one-woman” must perforce be “sordid.” And the work of the artist may be geared to the “clean and decent” and “law-abiding” as justifiably as to the “sordid.”

Besides her uncomplicated credo that “clean” and “everyday life” have their drama—and are preferable to the “sordid”—she has a very firm conviction that character portrayal is the foundation of fiction. One must understand and sympathize with people, she says. A writer must empathize completely with his people; only then can he write truly of experiences as they live them. “When I have mentally constructed a personality about whom I wish to write, I find myself somewhat lost in that personality, crawling back into the character's skin, so to speak, and viewing life from his standpoint” (Marble 12).

Aside from her deeply felt convictions as to kinds of life to present and characters to create, she holds one about writing as work. That is what it is for her and, she implies, for any serious writer. At times she actually walked the floor as if in physical pain, “trying to get hold of an idea which would only elude me” (“The Story Germ” 355).

Interestingly, she illustrates how the “germ” of a story came to her in a news item about an old college building that was to be razed. Working from the simple fact of the demolishment of a landmark, she gradually evolved the novel Miss Bishop, one of her greatest successes (“The Story Germ” 356-57).

Her finest work, A Lantern in Her Hand, had an unusual beginning. It is rooted in the history of her mother's and father's families. Her mother's tart answer to commiseration about the hardships of pioneer life was, “Oh, save your pity. We had the best time in the world.” Aldrich never forgot those words, thinking of them as she read—too often—how writers depicted the frontier women as “gaunt, brow-beaten creatures, despairing women whom life seemed to defeat” (“The Story behind A Lantern in Her Hand” 240).

And so she determined to write a novel that would amount to a tribute to her mother and others like her, women of intrepid spirit, courage, humor, and strength who had helped settle a wide and fertile land. It was to be more than a tribute: it was to be an authentic account of life on the plains during the early years.

Her research was enterprising. In 1927, at the request of the editor of the Nebraska State Journal, she spoke over the radio on the subject “The Pioneer in Fiction.” At the end of her speech she requested listeners to send her any anecdotes or facts about frontier living they might have. In reply she was flooded with material: newspaper clippings, diaries, letters, scrapbooks. In addition she interviewed many elderly people who could remember their pioneering days.

As a result A Lantern in Her Hand is a book rich in vivid—and homely—detail, a book so informative that it has frequently been used as supplementary reading in schools. From it the student gains not only knowledge, but a kind of awed admiration and respect for people like the Deals and their friends. For these people worked with what seems almost superhuman strength. They founded towns and built roads, established schools, staked out cemeteries. And they defied a grim and relentless Nature that time and again burned their crops with scorching sun or lashed at their poor homes with brutal blizzards.

As noted above, Aldrich lets her own attitudes toward life guide her writing. One easily sees, in novel after novel, short story after short story, exactly what values she holds. And these values are clearly recognizable as those of Midwestern rural and small-town society during the first half of the century.

The stories are free from profanity and any other sort of coarse language. As Robert Louis Stevenson was able to write a pirate tale without a single “cussword,” so Aldrich manages to give a sense of reality to life on the prairie without one. More, she can write of “modern” young people, university students, who speak clear unadorned English. Their slang is another matter, as will be noted later.

A few people in the Aldrich world smoke (males only), but no one ever drinks anything headier than coffee. As far as sex goes, it is as well hidden as in any Victorian novel. People fall in love; Aldrich tells us they do—indeed, she insists on it. But it is mostly a friendly “let's be partners” type of love. Once in a while a mild hint of something a bit earthier is evident, but this is not protracted. One senses, for instance, pure lust as Ed crushes young Abbie to him and begs her to marry him.

One senses it also in Miss Bishop when Delbert is courting Ella. His ardor vaguely worries her. When he yearns, “You're a cool little piece, aren't you, Ella? You do love me, don't you?” she assures him she does. She just wants to be “so sure.” Love is such a big thing; she wants to understand it. Delbert embraces her passionately, saying, “It's this!”

Aldrich goes on, “But Ella knew better—Ella Bishop knew her love was something more than that—something more deeply beautiful—something infinitely more delicate” (63-64).

Here the reader sees clearly that for Ella Bishop sex per se is unclean. True, the treachery of Delbert and Amy is a hideous thing. But the actual sex act would today be viewed as incidental. The 1870s (when Ella is young) of course saw this in a different light, and Aldrich is probably correct in her depiction of Ella's attitude, when she has her say witheringly to the little flirt who has seduced her fiancé: “You little animal.” But the reader understands clearly that Aldrich is in agreement.

In A White Bird Flying when Laura thinks of Allen Rinemiller, there seems to be physical desire. She loves him. She loves being with him, for he is the one person she can talk to. But because of her ambition she at first refuses his offer of marriage. She is going to New York, to a writing career! Neither he nor she gives a thought to extramarital sex.

When Kathy's and Jimmy's marriage is imperilled, no indication is given as to what effect on their sex life their disagreements have. Physical passion simply has no place in Aldrich's concept of “family fiction.”

There are no divorces in Aldrich's world, either, though there may occasionally—very occasionally—be a reference to an unhappy marriage. A case in point is that of Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn in A White Bird.

One of the most strongly held convictions of Aldrich's life is her theory of the place of women in society. The subject is one of crucial interest in our day; when Aldrich was writing it was coming disturbingly to the forefront. She has drawn some engaging women: Mother Mason, Nell Cutter, Abbie Deal, Linnie Stafford, and many, many more. Of her whole feminine galaxy only one career woman stands out: Ella Bishop, the teacher.

Ella is shown to be self-sufficient, courageous, energetic—in the end completely fulfilled. But she is alone. Though Grace Deal of A White Bird is also a self-sufficient and energetic single woman, she reveals in an uncharacteristic speech that her life has not been all she wished.

Nowhere has Aldrich put her case for “woman's place” so clearly as in The Cutters. Entertaining a former classmate who has become a successful businesswoman, Nell voices her envy. Her friend speaks: “Nellie,” she says gravely, “for everything in this world we pay the price. You bought your lovely family with your freedom; and the price I pay for freedom is—heartache. I have an infinite capacity for love—and no husband. I have the heart of a mother—and no child. We say the world progresses, and it does. Women have come up out of slavery and serfdom; they can stand shoulder to shoulder now with the men of the business, scholastic, and political world. But there are some fundamentals to which normal women will always look with longing eyes. In the last analysis, nothing can take the place of them. Love, home, children. I've put my heart and soul into the business, and results show it. I'm rather justly proud of what I've accomplished. And yet—all I really want is a corner of my own, green and shady and restful, where I may sit and … rock the baby I never had” (101).

There is an echo of these sentiments, couched in much crisper language, in the advice Grace Deal, a successful university professor, gives her niece Laura. Don't do as I did, she says in effect: don't turn down love and home and family for a career!

Thus Aldrich vividly illustrates what Betty Friedan, decades later, was to call “the feminine mystique.” And Aldrich's attitude is neatly summarized in what Friedan says of Helene Deutsche: “This brilliant feminine follower of Freud states categorically that the women who by 1944 in America had achieved eminence by activity of their own in various fields had done so at the expense of their feminine fulfillment” (121).

But Carol Fairbanks remarks that, cheerful and optimistic as Aldrich's Lantern is, her Abbie Deal is barred from developing her artistic and musical talents; she must see them flower in her children and grandchildren (107). Thus Abbie “is the archetypal nineteenth-century woman who sets aside her personal needs and arranges finances so that her daughters realize their dreams” (202).

Fairbanks further points out that Aldrich has underscored the position of women in pioneering days. In Spring Came on Forever the German immigrant expects to get ahead because he has land, a good team of horses, and a woman. Said woman must work hard and be as unobtrusive as possible in order to escape his wrath.

Contrast the personality of Nell's friend with Willa Cather's Alexandra Bergson, a woman who is stronger than her brothers and who, with superb ability and great labor, carves a fine farm from the rich Nebraska country. Her life, at the end of the story, is to be completed by her marriage with Carl.

Or turn to Ruth Suckow and see how she handles a similar theme in her novel Cora. Cora has done well in the business world, has become one of the successful women of the city: “She could hold her own among them. She was almost ‘at the top.’ She had wanted to attain this—life would have been a failure if she hadn't done so. Now she struggled fiercely to enjoy what she had won.

“But there was something wrong … There had to be something else … something inside of things … she did not know how to put it.”

In spite of obvious similarities, Aldrich differs—I believe fundamentally—from other women who have written of the Midwest, precisely in this question of feminine values. Certainly, as has been noted, she shows strong women, women of courage and perseverance, with a decided bent toward independence. But unlike Cather's Alexandra and Ántonia and Thea, and Suckow's Cora, their strength and fulfillment come from womanliness.

They come, not from meeting the world in the manner of a man, not from managing farms and ranches, or climbing the corporate ladder, or buying and selling. Mother Mason, Nell Cutter, Abbie Deal, and other Aldrich women characters do not lead easy lives, are certainly not immune to physical and emotional suffering. But theirs is not the suffering of marketplace competition nor the frustration of political losses. It is not even the turmoil of the artistic life, the grueling labor and almost intolerable pressures of careers on the stage, the painstaking work of the writer or the painter.

No, Aldrich's women find their greatest satisfaction in being sturdy daughters, devoted wives, strict and compassionate mothers. For instance, we see Laura Deal giving up her writing plans to be happy as wife and mother. We see Abbie sorrowful when her daughter Isabelle tells her she and her husband plan not to have children so they can both pursue their musical careers. And how much more sorrowful Abbie is when daughter Grace announces that she will remain single!

A much more important difference between Aldrich and other Midwest writers is that she never questions the basic assumptions of “moral” middle-class life. She sees heroism in this life, and she sees humor, but she never really probes beneath its surface.

Ruth Suckow, on the other hand, has an uneasy awareness that something is amiss in the structure of middle-class society. She has a sense of unsatisfactory aspects in the relations of the sexes, for example. Willa Cather, with all the poetry of her narratives, feels keenly—and transmits to her readers—some of the profound problems of “normal” people: jealousy, hatred, revenge, ambition. Mari Sandoz, aware as she is of the beauty and promise of the Great Plains, is devastatingly truthful about showing the ugliness that can flourish in the midst of it all. Helen Hooven Santmyer, demure as she seems in her sweeping novel And Ladies of the Club, shows what meanness can lie beneath the surface of a quiet Ohio town. Examples can go on and on. Something in the very makeup of society is askew, as American writers have insisted from James Fenimore Cooper on through Mark Twain to our own time.

Since about the beginning of the present century, which signaled the start of the “revolt from the village” movement, small-town life has been a popular theme. From E. W. Howe's Story of a Country Town to Sinclair Lewis's Main Street down to And Ladies of the Club and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegone Days, writers of fiction have delighted in exposing the faults, the meannesses, the unlovely provincialism, of many Winesburgs and Gopher Prairies. Such fiction has often been scathing, often cynical, occasionally satirical. Aldrich, on the contrary, looks at little towns with loving eyes and warm sympathy. And she is adept at finding amusing incidents in the lives of her characters.

True, she does admit that “culture” is regarded suspiciously. And in one story, “Welcome Home, Hal,” she departs from her usual attitude to remark, “A small Midwestern town through alien eyes is sometimes not a lovely thing.”

Her basic feeling, however, is illustrated by Nell Cutter's outburst: “All our modern authors have just two types of people in their small town writings: the discontented kind, or the dull, stolid kind who are too dumb to know enough to be discontented. I'm not either one—and there are a lot of us—and I'd like to have Miss Duffield know it. We're not all dowdy and we're not all crude.”

After all, Aldrich says, “What were the fundamentally big things of life, the things that were eternal? Knowledge … appearances … sophistication? Or truth … friendship … love?” (Cutters 200-01).

Though she wrote during and after the World War I years, Bess Streeter Aldrich has nothing to say about war hysteria, “the red menace,” labor troubles, breadlines, voices both loud and quiet who insist that something is amiss, that some sectors of the population are wronged, are restless, are demanding redress.

Her Cutters and Masons, her modern Deals—her businessmen and bankers and university instructors—live their emotional and financial lives apparently untouched by the world around them. Nowhere is there evidence that this author had read and enjoyed Jane Austen, but a reader can conclude that she would have sympathized with her as she kept her characters out of the turbulence of their era.

A rather curious attitude occasionally surfaces in Aldrich's fiction; one feels almost discourteous in mentioning it, for it is so obviously unconscious. This is her feeling against the American East. It stands to reason, of course, that she would be enthusiastic about the Midwest. Never has anyone loved a place more, nor felt so joyous in the love of it. That love breathes through every line of Lantern, for instance, the novel written as a tribute to pioneer women. It is everywhere in Rim of the Prairie, in Miss Bishop, in A White Bird Flying. But often it is accompanied by something almost like veiled hostility toward the East.

This hostility is mainly implied. Young Abbie Deal's flashy suitor, Dr. Ed, begs her to come with him to New York. There he can give her cultural advantages, have her lovely voice trained. Her granddaughter Laura has a chance to go to New York to be a companion to her wealthy uncle and aunt (and eventually to inherit their fortune) while taking advantage of the cultural atmosphere to develop her writing talent. Both girls refuse because they love their honest farmer sweethearts more than they crave the “opportunities” of the East.

A White Bird Flying contains one scene that is rather explicit about the East-Midwest problem. Several college girls are discussing the attitude of Easterners toward Nebraska, their ignorance of the state, and their condescension. One tells of the Easterner who, when a story in the Saturday Evening Post is mentioned, says, “Oh, do they have the Saturday Evening Post in Nebraska?” And, “I would expect the trees here look odd to you?” one visiting Nebraskan is asked.

Another tells of a newspaper woman who, visiting in New York, counters the obvious condescension of her hosts by pointing out that the author Willa Cather, the comedian Harold Lloyd, and the sculptor Gutzum Borglum are all Nebraskans. She finishes by saying she'll be delighted to visit Coney Island—it was designed by a “Nebraska boy.”

Laura and Allen (in White Bird) argue about the Midwest versus the East. She tells him there's no “atmosphere” in the Midwest; as one of her professors has said, “no spiritual uplift.” Allen asks where she could find “more substantial people,” and she counters with the remark that “substantial people” are poor literary material.

According to her professor, there is no “great beauty” in the Midwest—no sea, no mountains, etc. The landscape is “monotonous.” Allen answers with the Bad Lands of Dakota, the blue sky over the Nebraska sand hills, the Minnesota lakes and birches.

Thus, here and there in her fiction, Aldrich seems to be on the defensive as far as the Midwest is concerned, repelling possible attacks, as it were. And, as has been noted, her love of her native region is so deep that it permeates her work.

It certainly is apparent in her descriptions of nature. Probably no American writer has been more delightfully graphic when it comes to settings. In her pictures of the country, Aldrich rivals Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Ruth Suckow. One feels the country as she spreads it before one. Observe her description of spring: “Spring came over the prairie—not softly, shyly, but in great magic strides. It was in the flush of grass on the alders and willows of Stove Creek. It was in the wind,—in the smell of loam and grasses, in the tantalizing odor of wild plums budding and wild violets flowering …” (Lantern 82-83).

Compare that passage with Willa Cather's spring day: “It was a beautiful blue morning. The buffalo peas were blooming in pink and purple masses along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year's dried sunflower stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and their yellow breasts aquiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet gusts” (My Ántonia 127-28).

Aldrich's feeling for the plains, for Nebraska, is more than simple love; it is a vital empathy. Because of this she is as forceful in her descriptions of the frightening aspects of the land as in its more gracious moods. For her, as for Cather and Sandoz, it is a living, breathing presence.

When it comes to making the reader experience the white terror of a plains blizzard, she is a powerful artist. Her storm scenes have all the dreadful actuality of Sandoz's. And probably no one has described a tornado more impressively than she has in Rim of the Prairie. Her words are worthy of being quoted at length:

Above the trees an immense yellow-black smoke whirled up into the sky, spiraling, rotating, in great volume … it was no fire but a more cruel thing. Greenish clouds had whipped themselves into the bowl of a huge wine-glass. … There was no sound anywhere. No wind in the trees. No bird sang. No cock crew. There was silence everywhere save in the frenzied heart of the Thing that moved swiftly across the prairie. It boiled and crackled and roared. It was heavy. But it was not clumsy. Gracefully it moved. Almost daintily it picked its way in and out of the farmlands. It bent and swayed and sung. The stem stretched and pulled away from the bowl. But it did not break. It sucked at the ground and whatever it touched, living or inanimate thing, answered its wild call and was pulled up into the cloud glass to make wine for the fallen gods.

(332)

One may note an egregious mixing of metaphors here, and one may object to the prolixity. But no reader can escape a feeling of breathless immediacy. One is there living the terror, overwhelmed with the realization of the sheer strength of elemental powers.

Aldrich's easy, almost conversational style lends itself to humor, and here she is distinctive. Her reader is always conscious of a sunny temperament, one that takes pleasure in the small amusements of life, that finds laughter in day-to-day happenings. Life, whether on the grim frontier or in a small Midwestern town, is filled with little chuckles, brief moments of laughter.

Some of the humor seems off-hand. For instance, in The Cutters one finds a bit of totally unconscious irony in Grandma's description of the successful careers of her six sons. She ends her statement with the remark that Robbie, the “rascallyest” one of all, is the new governor of the state.

But unfortunately, in Aldrich's amusement she is inclined to go too far. She not only laughs; all too often she points up her laughter with references that make her remarks seem dangerously close to wisecracks.

As an example, see how she describes a committee planning a function: “Over the dinner itself there was enough discussion to have filled a book the size of the classic which Mr. Webster wrote” (Cutters 185). And the reader winces as an old Civil War veteran remembers Christmas in Atlanta, when they burned the city “before startin' out with Sherman on that little hoofin' jaunt we took to the sea.”

Miss Bishop yields several noteworthy examples. Here she remarks that “hundreds of little towns grew to their full size of two or five or ten thousand, paused in their growth, and admitted that none of them by taking Chamber-of-Commerce thought could add one cubit to its stature” (3). When Midwestern College holds its opening ceremony, “There was [sic] prayers, in which the president informed the Lord of the current events of the morning” (11).

Further, “Professor Carter made an heroic attempt to initiate the novices into the mysteries of Chaucer” (20). And, “A Professor O'Neill, representing Messrs Caesar, Ovid, and Livy, taught for a single year, as his radical views on the origin of the human race, which he so often found occasion to wedge in between the Aquitannians and the Belgae, proved his undoing, and he was summarily dismissed” (136).

Often, too, Aldrich is guilty of an embarrassing affectation: she is fond of parodying famous lines of poetry. The Rim of the Prairie contains a statement about a young teacher: “By the next night Nancy's head, pedagogically speaking, was bloody but unbowed” (106). And in The Cutters another teacher, near the end of summer, remarks that “in one week I go like the quarry slave at night, scourged to the dungeon of his schoolroom” (245). A very little of this kind of thing goes a long way, and regrettably Aldrich overdoes it.

Some readers might find the conversations of her young girls excessively irritating. Many of these girls seem interchangeable, from Nancy Moore of Rim, through Katherine Deal of White Bird to Gretchen of Miss Bishop. All of them exhibit an airy flippancy supposed to be funny, but which all too often ends in making one flinch.

Nancy says to Aunt Biny, “Real love, Aunt Biny, belongs to another generation. It went out with rubber-tired buggies and castors for centerpieces” (Rim 55). And she assures the worried little woman about her engagement: “I'll try to idolize Mr. Farnsworth. He's getting a bit bald on the north mansard roof slope of his head and he's a little too short and a little too fat and a lot older than the hero ought to be. But I'll do my best to moon over him” (58). Abbie Deal's granddaughter Kathy flaunts a like breezy cynicism, though she does marry for love.

In White Bird Laura's college friends, discussing campus affairs, show a studied cleverness. Jealousy is “acid raisins”; an assignment in a literature course is “a date with the Russian writer Tchekov”; Shakespeare is always “Billy.”

The most egregious case of strained flippancy can be found in the character of Gretchen, Ella Bishop's foster grandniece. This young woman is hardly bearable. Utterly uninhibited, she seems never to express a worthwhile idea. Not only are all male professors “papa” to her, she can apparently take nothing—and no one—seriously. Rummaging in an old trunk, she finds poor Ella's unfinished wedding gown, and without permission tries it on. “Am I not perfect?” she says, coming before her aunt. “Isn't it the answer to a maiden's prayer? May I wear it? What does the sweet old auntie say? … You're stunned speechless at my gorgeousness, aren't you? … What's the answer, sweet pumpkin?” (280-81).

When Ella supplies the money so Gretchen can live in the sorority house, the girl expresses her appreciation with, “I think you're a luscious old peach. I suppose I ought to be noble and say I couldn't think of accepting the offer, but I'm crazy to do it, and will take you at your word that you really want me to” (283). Later on she tells Ella, “You're an old smoothy,—in fact you're probably the noblest soul that ever trod over campus dandelions” (296).

If humor lightens Aldrich's narratives, an irritating tendency toward didacticism gives occasional heavy moments. This writer simply cannot keep from pointing a moral—and too often it is a moral that readers are quite capable of finding for themselves. Further, most of her “moral” passages are interwoven with a sugary sentimentalism quite unworthy of so gifted a teller of tales.

An excellent example may be quoted from a Christmas story, “The Drum Goes Dead”: “And so suddenly that it seemed a new thought—though it was as old as the silent stars—a bright-colored strand wove itself across the gray warp of his mind. The world was not in chaos to these children. Through their eyes it was still the same world of limited dimensions he and these other burdened people had known as children, and because this was so, it was still a good world.

“Humanity must hang fast to its faith and its hope. It must never let them go as long as there remained in the world a child and a song,—a gift and a star” (65; emphasis Aldrich's).

This didacticism sometimes extends to descriptions of characters. Aldrich presents many interesting people; even her minor actors are colorful. However, she feels obliged to discuss them with the reader; they would do very well if she just left them alone. An especially vivid example is that of Nancy Moore, of Rim. She is charming, but her author is not content to show us that she is; she must tell us: “She could no more have abandoned that gay little way of hers than she could have changed the color of her eyes” (21).

Despite flaws such as these, Aldrich's style is smooth and lucid, shot through with the good-natured humor of a pleasant, good-natured personality. Her readers are both soothed and gently amused.

As I have attempted to show, Bess Streeter Aldrich gives faithful pictures of frontier life. The bulk of her work, however, concerns small-town families living according to the tenets of what George Bernard Shaw once called “middle class morality.” Clearly she has presented what she sees as truth about life. Indeed, one interviewer has observed that “perhaps her strength has been in the fact that she has not lost contact at any time with the real people in this land” (Sherlock 29). If her vision has been affected by her own sunny disposition and the values she learned as a child, she is no different from many other earnest writers of fiction. She has a right to be called a realist according to her own lights.

But the term is not technically applicable to her work. Her predilection is for a pleasant romanticism, a deft veiling of the darker aspects of life. She certainly knew they existed; every now and then a reference is made (in some cases almost reluctantly) to lust, to greed, to sorrow, to frustration. But the overall picture is one of satisfaction in being alive, in doing one's work well, and, above all, in loving one's family and friends.

A critic is wrong to fault a writer for not doing what he or she did not intend to do, and Aldrich has said plainly that she did not intend to write of sophisticated people, of perverts, of “sin.” “Life has been wholesome, sane and happy for me,” she writes, “… I have set down life as I have found it, knowing that many, many people in the world have known it as I have—a thing of mingled happiness and sorrow, little pleasures and little disappointments, deep courage, high faith, grief, laughter, and love” (Marble 41).

In a very revealing article, “Why I Live in a Small Town,” she is almost militant: “Why quarrel with a writer over realism and idealism? After all, an author is glass through which a picture of life is projected. The picture falls upon the pages of the writer's manuscript according to the mental and emotional contours of that writer. It is useless to try to change those patterns. If one writer does not see life in terms of grime and dirt, adulteries and debaucheries, it does not follow that those sordid things do not exist. If another does not see life in terms of faith and love, sympathy and good deeds, it does not follow that those characteristics do not exist. I grow weary of hearing the sordid spoken of as real life, the wholesome as Pollyanna stuff. I contend that a writer may portray some of the decent things of life around him and reserve the privilege to call that real life too. And if this be literary treason, make the most of it” (21).

A publisher's note confirms her words; speaking of how she “sought to convey the sturdy cheerful realism of her mother,” it points to her “intelligent optimism that has illumined all of her … work, setting her apart from the mass of current writers, who tend too often to view the American scene darkly and despondently” (The Bess Streeter Aldrich Reader v).

And a bit of grudging—almost reluctant—praise occurs in the entry devoted to her in Twentieth Century Authors (1942): “Her typical book covers the entire life, from youth to age, of a Middle Western woman, and her thesis is that love, marriage, and children are the most important things in life. Her intense feeling for nature, a natural gift for characterization, and her humor place her work in a rather higher category than its philosophy might indicate” (17).

A less gracious reviewer acknowledging the virtues of Lantern, observes that “Mrs. Aldrich does make the settlement of the West seem an epic accomplishment. … She does make bearing children and loving them, and teaching them, and cheerfully giving up all the world that they might have it instead, seem worth doing.” This is obviously written tongue in cheek, for the writer adds sneeringly, “Novels will go on telling about these things forever, and people will read them, and laugh over them, and cry over them. And it will do people no harm” (Saturday Review of Literature 17 Nov. 1928: 371).

One excellent proof of her views concerning writing is the fact that for a while she read book manuscripts for a monthly book club called “The Family Bookshelf.” The object was to eliminate literature not suitable for children. (Other members of the reading committee were Drew Pearson, Dr. Daniel Poling, and Edwin Balmer, editor of Redbook.)

Certainly many readers found her outlook on life and literature congenial. When the Lincoln Kiwanis Club honored her, one tribute began, “Books that sneer at the frailties of mankind, or books that discourage human aspiration, will always impress me as nothing better than bad books. It is the glory of Nebraska, I think, that we have a writer who has never been touched by the frost of what is cynical or bitter. She walks bravely with a lantern in her hand, always a mellow light shines from her fiction. Sanity and a gracious spirit are the soul of her work.”

However, even those who agree with Aldrich's convictions might feel a little restless when reading some of her fiction. Miss Bishop, for example. This is a charming novel in many ways, and colorful in its delineation of the start and growth of a great university. Ella Bishop is a likeable heroine—except for the fact that she has no flaws. Time after time she gives up her desires for other people, mainly her family. One of her more painful decisions is consenting to rear the child of her faithless lover and the woman with whom he has betrayed her.

Yearning to go to Europe, she twice relinquishes her plans for a trip abroad. On the first occasion her aged mother is ailing, and on the second her supremely selfish foster niece needs money in order to live in a sorority house. Later Ella sends the girl on a trip to Europe to escape a disastrous love affair. In all the crises of her life, Ella Bishop's first thought is for someone else.

But how one would have liked to see her, if only a few times, succumb to selfishness, to irresponsibility, yes, to passion! If only just once she had told her selfish family that she was going to do as she wished! (As a matter of fact, many of her sacrifices are made over the protests of her family and friends.)

One wishes she had had at least one glorious, ecstatic night with John Stevens, instead of refusing him because he is married (even though she knows his wife gives him nothing), and because she must stay “pure” so she can, in her own eyes, be a proper role model for her students. One would have liked her to be a little indiscreet, occasionally, and perhaps been rapped over the knuckles for it. One wishes, in sum, that she hadn't constantly been loving and giving and idealistic—and always with a merry quip at her own expense!

Miss Bishop may be an extreme example, but the romanticism that suffuses it may be seen here and there in all Aldrich's work. Nor is she above a bit of gentle mysticism. A good instance of this can be found in Lantern. It occurs at the end of the chapter telling of the ingenious ways Abbie and Will, in spite of crushing poverty, made Christmas for their little children.

The youngsters, before going to bed, look out at the silent, snowy night and see a star which, they say gleefully, is stopping right over their house. Aldrich meditates:

Historians say, “The winter of 'seventy-four to seventy-five was a time of deep depression. …” Deep depression? To three children on the prairie it was a time of glamour. There was not much to eat in the cupboard. There was little or no money in the father's flat old pocketbook. The presents were pitifully homely and meager. And all in a tiny house,—a mere shell of a house, on a new raw acreage of the wild, bleak prairie. How could a little rude cabin hold so much white magic? How could a little sod house know such enchantment? And how could a little hut like that eventually give to the midwest so many influential men and women? How, indeed? Unless … unless, perchance, the star did stop over the house?

(116)

Twin to romanticism is a certain innocence that crops up now and then in her work. One is amused to read of college-educated Nell Cutter's failed attempt at short-story writing. Her first effort is rejected by an editor who tells her to “go into the technical construction of story work.” Nell's reaction is amazement: “Technical!” she says. “Whoever dreamed that there was any technical construction to a story? I thought when popular writers wrote they just sat down and wrote. It looks so easy, as thought it just rolled off their pens” (213).

And Laura Deal, just out of the University, thinks there's not enough “scope” for the creative writer in the Midwest. The people are “ordinary,” the scenery “uninspiring.” It is as if she'd never heard of Madame Bovary, or the one passion and four walls of Dumas, as if she were ignorant of the dramatic possibilities inner conflicts can present.

However, for all the flaws in style—the excesses of over-done humor, of didacticism, of sentimentality—Bess Streeter Aldrich remains a notable figure, fully worthy to be ranked as one of the gifted writers of Midwestern fiction—a group including Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Ruth Suckow, Martha Ostenso, to name a few of the women. Fairbanks links her with Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder as one of “three prairie women writers” (188).

In Abbie Deal, Aldrich has created a woman to compare favorably with Cather's Alexandra Bergson and Ántonia Shimerda. With her courage and spirit Abbie is very like Sandoz's Dr. Morissa Kirk in her resourcefulness, in the practical way she makes use of the materials about her. She never flinches at hardship or pain, though she has moments, as is natural, of feminine longing and resentment, moments when life seems too hard to bear. But she always straightens her shoulders and goes on. She is, when all is said, the epitome of the courage, the endurance, and the ethical constancy which Americans like to think make up the spirit of the pioneer. A Lantern in Her Hand accomplishes what Aldrich planned it should: it pays tribute to the intrepidity and fearlessness of the women who left their homes to accompany their men to an unsettled land fraught with unknown dangers.

Perhaps Aldrich knew the writings of contemporary Midwestern authors such as Cather, Sandoz, Suckow, and Ostenso, but no indication of such knowledge exists. Perhaps she would have felt a distance between her and these women, all of whom refuse to ignore the sordid aspects of rural life. None of them has the determined cheerfulness that wins out in Aldrich's fiction.

But it may be that very element of cheer that made her appreciated by so many readers—surprisingly different readers. For instance, Admiral Chester Nimitz wrote her that he and his officers gained courage reading A Lantern in Her Hand during the worst days of World War II in the Pacific. And his is only one of many letters expressing like sentiments.

One is struck by the tone of some of these letters. They seem to attest to the charm of Aldrich's personality, the pleasant graciousness that one senses between the lines of her stories. Acknowledging biographical materials Aldrich has sent her, one woman says, “It means a great deal to my friends and myself to discover that a person who knows fame and success, could be interested in just ordinary folks.”

Again, a fifteen-year-old girl writes with adolescent emotion, “It seems funny—we have never seen each other, you didn't even know I existed and yet you are one of my best friends—one to whom I tell my secrets to [sic]—one who I feel will understand me … I love you, Mrs. Aldrich, because you know and can put into beautiful words all that I feel within me.”

Near the end of his detailed critique of one of Sarah Orne Jewett's short stories, Louis A. Renza inserts a significant quotation. Jewett, in one of her letters, says, “I often think that the literary work which takes the least prominent place, nowadays, is that belonging to the middle ground. Scholars and so-called intellectual persons have a wealth of literature in the splendid accumulation of books that belong to all times, and now and then a new volume is added to the great list. Then there is the lowest level of literature, the trashy newspaper and sensational novels, but how seldom a book comes that stirs the minds and hearts of the good men and women of such a village as this” (178).

These words seem peculiarly apropos to Aldrich's work if we read “village” to mean “just ordinary folks.” Indeed these are precisely the people for whom Bess Streeter Aldrich felt the greatest affinity, and for whom she wrote.

Besides her writing, which seems to have been a real labor of love as well as a means of livelihood, she enjoyed activities in her church (Methodist), Order of Eastern Star, Nebraska Writers Guild (of which she was for a time president), the Nebraska Press Association, the Omaha Women's Press Club, Altrusa of Lincoln, and the honorary societies Chi Delta Phi (national literary fraternity) and Theta Sigma Phi (national journalistic sorority).

In 1934 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by the University of Nebraska for her achievements as homemaker, author, citizen, and one giving distinguished service to Nebraska. And in 1939 the Lincoln Kiwanis Club honored her with the Distinguished Service Medal as “Homemaker, Citizen, and Author.”

After her death on 3 August 1954, 52nd Street, where her Lincoln home stood, was renamed “Aldrich Road.” Eleven years later in the small town of Elmwood, a Nebraska Historical Marker sponsored by the Elmwood Library Board was dedicated to her. It stands in Elmwood Park, across the street from the house in which she lived for many years.

In 1973 she was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame, the second woman to be so honored; only Willa Cather preceded her. And in 1976, at the celebration of the nation's Bicentennial, she was named one of the Ten Mothers of Achievement from Nebraska.

An unusual honor was bestowed upon her as recently as 1984. The unique publishing company, Amereon House (Mattituck, New York) reprinted The Home-Coming and Other Stories and Across the Smiling Meadows and Other Stories. Joanna Paulson, the editor, says in a preface to the latter volume that the purpose of the publishers is “to preserve and distribute the efforts of authors of quality and popularity that have fallen between the cracks [sic] in our modern, fast-paced society” (7).

One cannot see Bess Streeter Aldrich as a “forgotten” literary figure. In 1987 Elmwood, her home town, honored her memory with an “Aldrich Day.” The “Bess Streeter Aldrich Foundation,” formed in 1977, seeks to promote her work and is ambitious to raise money for a “permanent memorial.”

One of the most significant examples of the praise she has received may be found in the 1949 poll by a group of scholastic magazines. Asked to name the ten books which have done the best job of telling about American life, the readers included A Lantern in Her Hand—the only one of the ten not filmed.

Certainly Bess Streeter Aldrich's work is a faithful, if not a complete, picture of American life. Readers can turn with confidence to her richly detailed and authentic account of pioneering on the prairies, of everyday life in small towns, to restore their faith in the spirit of their country.