Post by koshergrit on Jun 8, 2007 19:40:24 GMT -4
dwanollah said:
For all of you who hate Cousin Charley, here's a blurb from an earlier paper of mine (on the political ideology in the LH books):Rose was enthusiastic, and again provided the necessary help by editing her mother’s work. In a letter to her mother, she wrote “If you find it easier to write in the first person, write that way”:
I will change it into the third person, later. Of course, I have said nothing about having run the manuscript through my own typewriter, because the changes I made, as you will see, are so slight that they could not even be properly called editing. It is really your own work, practically word for word (Miller, 183-184).
Neither Rose nor Laura saw such editing as deceit, and it wasn’t unlike work Rose had done in the past on her “fictionalized biographies” on Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover, typical writing for the early 20th century. It is especially important to remember that, ultimately, the LH books were written for young readers, and written as fiction and classified as fiction, not autobiography… something of which both women were extremely conscious. One letter documents Rose’s reaction to an episode her mother wrote about Laura finally threatening Cousin Charley with a knife in BTSOSL when he kept trying to kiss her and touch her: “Maybe you did it, but you cannot do it in fiction; you cannot make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book” (RWL to LIW, 21 Jan. 1938, Hoover).
I will change it into the third person, later. Of course, I have said nothing about having run the manuscript through my own typewriter, because the changes I made, as you will see, are so slight that they could not even be properly called editing. It is really your own work, practically word for word (Miller, 183-184).
Neither Rose nor Laura saw such editing as deceit, and it wasn’t unlike work Rose had done in the past on her “fictionalized biographies” on Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover, typical writing for the early 20th century. It is especially important to remember that, ultimately, the LH books were written for young readers, and written as fiction and classified as fiction, not autobiography… something of which both women were extremely conscious. One letter documents Rose’s reaction to an episode her mother wrote about Laura finally threatening Cousin Charley with a knife in BTSOSL when he kept trying to kiss her and touch her: “Maybe you did it, but you cannot do it in fiction; you cannot make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book” (RWL to LIW, 21 Jan. 1938, Hoover).
Laura is a GANGSTA!!!
I always suspected that she could do something like this...remember the story from LTOTP when she sasses Eliza Jane in school and rocks the bench?
Girl could take care of herself.
