Bess Streeter Aldrich and the Pioneer She Knew

Bess Streeter Aldrich was born in Iowa in eighteen eighty-one and came to Nebraska in nineteen oh nine with her husband and young family, settling in the small town of Elmwood, about twenty miles southeast of Lincoln. She was already writing, had been writing since childhood, and she would build from that small town a literary career that reached national bestseller lists and stayed there.

Her most enduring novel, A Lantern in Her Hand, was published in nineteen twenty-eight. Its protagonist, Abbie Deal, is a Nebraska pioneer woman who gives up artistic ambitions to raise a family on the plains, who watches the territory become a state and the homestead become a farm and her children grow up and leave and build different lives than she imagined for them. The character was modeled partly on Aldrich's own mother.

Aldrich understood her subject from proximity. She had watched elderly Nebraska women, people who had lived through the territorial period and statehood and the drought years, describe what they had seen. She listened carefully. Her fiction did not romanticize the hardship. The cold was cold. The isolation was isolation. The grief of a woman watching a child die on the prairie far from any doctor or church was rendered without sentiment and without comfort.

A Lantern in Her Hand was popular enough that it has never gone out of print. The University of Nebraska Press has kept it in circulation, and it appears regularly on Nebraska school reading lists.

When Aldrich died in nineteen fifty-four, she was buried beside her husband in Elmwood.