among the novels that followed were A White Bird Flying ( 1931), Miss Bishop
( 1933), and The Lieutenant's Lady ( 1942).

In 1946, Aldrich sold her home in Elmwood and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska,
to be close to her daughter. In her later years, her writing slowed, and she
produced, on average, just one story a year. In 1952, Aldrich was diagnosed
with cancer and succumbed to the disease on August 3, 1954, at the age of
seventy-three. She is buried next to her husband in Elmwood, Nebraska.

Aldrich's writing career spanned more than half a century, beginning with a
short story, "A Late Love," published in the Baltimore News in 1898, and ending
with "The Outsider," another short piece that appeared in the Christian Herald
in 1954. While her literature runs the gamut from children's tales to Christmas
stories, the struggle of the frontier woman is at the heart of Aldrich's best fiction,
including The Rim of the Prairie ( 1925), A Lantern in Her Hand ( 1928), and
Spring Came on Forever ( 1935). It was A Lantern in Her Hand, however, that
would win Aldrich international acclaim.

A Lantern in Her Hand explores the day-to-day struggles of Abbie Deal, a
character whose invincible courage allows her to triumph over every adversity,
including droughts, prairie fires, snake bites, blinding blizzards, and the death
of her newborn infant. Aldrich deliberately capitalized on human drama as a
significant and successful ingredient in her aesthetic formula. By placing ordi-
nary human beings--housewives, farmers, pioneers, children--in situations that
tested their courage, exposed their weaknesses, and revealed their strengths, she
was able to invoke universal themes that readers could readily embrace.

A Lantern in Her Hand begins with Abbie Deal's adult children gathering in
her home after her death; the remainder of the novel is a reconstruction of her
life from the age of eight. One of the major thematic emphases embedded in
the text is Abbie's fear of death, which stems from a traumatic episode in her
early childhood. Death is never far from her thoughts; she seems, in fact, to
spend a lifetime preparing for it, which both humanizes her and renders her
sympathetic to the reader.

Aldrich irreverently states at the beginning of the novel (which takes place
between the years 1854 and 1926), "This is the story of the old lady who died
while the meat burned [on the stove] and the children played 'Run, Sheep, Run,'
across her yard" ( 6 ). As her middle-aged children--a banker, a state legislator,
a professional singer, a university professor, and a homemaker--convene in "the
old parlor with its familiar objects" ( 6 ), they are consumed by grief and guilt
that their mother died alone. Only Abbie's twelve-year-old granddaughter,
Laura, possesses the wisdom that allows her to view the death without the
sentiment that clouds the perceptions of Abbie's adult children. Laura's uncon-
ventional views help to illuminate an important subtext in the novel: the ability
of Abbie to detach herself from emotional entanglements with others. Despite
her obvious love for her children, for example, Abbie describes herself, in the

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