A Daughter of the Middle Border

Hamlin Garland continues the family memoir he began with A Son of the Middle Border, the 1917 volume that made his hardscrabble prairie childhood into an unexpected bestseller, by turning this second installment toward the women of his family and toward his own uncertain years building a literary career in Boston and Chicago. The book follows his aging parents in the West Salem, Wisconsin homestead he had persuaded them to buy, his mother's long decline and death, and his father's last years, set against Garland's slow transformation from an unknown writer influenced by Henry George's ideas about land and taxation into an established figure in the Chicago literary world.

Garland also brings his own marriage to Zulime Taft, sister of the sculptor Lorado Taft, and the arrival of his children into the same unsentimental frame he uses for the rest of the family's history, treating fatherhood and domestic life as continuous with the harder pioneer labor the earlier volume described rather than as a soft coda to it. The prairie itself keeps a steady presence throughout, not as scenery but as the physical fact that shaped every choice the family made, and Garland writes about hard farm labor and constant westward movement with the same close observed detail that had made the first volume's account of frontier settlement feel lived rather than remembered.

Reading it means following a memoir built from real affection without much softening, since Garland does not spare his family, or himself, difficult truths about ambition, disappointment, and the toll the frontier took on people who did not choose it so much as inherit it. It suits a reader who came to the Middle Border story through the first volume and wants the rest of the family's history, and it rewards attention with a portrait of American settlement told through the women who are too often left out of frontier narratives centered on the men who did the plowing.