If asked to list midwestern women writers of the early 20th century, you might be perplexed momentarily. Then you remember Willa Cather, the Pulitzer Prize winner, and the effect of her brilliant novels on generations of women. Her masterpieces, A Lost Lady, The Professor‘s House, and Lucy Gayheart, are incomparable, deftly mixing tragedy and humor.

Cather fans used to feel like rebels in a secret society, since academics dismissed Cather as a “craftsman.” That has changed due to the passion of readers, scholars, and the National Willa Cather Society in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up. Finally her books are in the canon.

We have read her books again and again, but it took us years to discover Bess Streeter Aldrich and Edna Ferber, her less famous peers. We searched bins in shabby trolleys in front of used bookstores. We browsed the webpages of university presses. We acquired cheap omnibus volumes of their work (Aldrich $3, Ferber 50 cents). And again we felt like members of a secret society reading Willa’s “second-rate peers.”

Of the two aforementioned writers, you are most likely to know Edna Ferber, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. Several of her novels have also been adapted as movies, including Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, and Cimarron, starring Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. (I recommend Giant.)

Born in Michigan in 1885, Ferber was a prolific writer. Her style may seem old-fashioned and sentimental, but her novels are impeccably-plotted and fast-paced. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, So Big, is a revelatory portrait of the brilliant, unconventional Selena Dejong, who turns a failing truck farm into a success after the death of her inefficient husband. She is hard-working and shrewd, but devotes her personal life to her undeserving beloved son, Dirk, who was nicknamed “So Big” during his childhood. He ruins his life, falling in love with a manipulative, mercenary woman, not quite appreciating his mother. What a sad, intense novel.

There is also plenty of humor. I love the dialogue in the passage below, when Selena scandalizes her neighbors by driving her vegetables to market alone, accompanied only by her son Dirk.

“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”

Mrs. Klaas Pool… smiled her slippery, crooked smile. “What could you expect? Look how she’s always acted.”

Klasas did not follow this. “It don’t seem hardly possible. Time she come here as a school teacher I drove her out and she was like a little robin or what, set up on the seat…”

But in the long run, I prefer Bess Streeter Aldrich’s quieter books. Born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 1881, Aldrich moved to Nebraska with her husband Charles after their marriage. (You can visit her home in Elmwood, Nebraska.) In the writing of her novels, she often relied on the stories of her mother, who was a pioneer in Iowa. She also interviewed early settlers in Nebraska and studied documents and letters before she wrote her most famous novel, A Lantern in Her Hand.

This heartbreaking novel is powerful but uneven. It is the story of Abbie Deal, who as a young woman moves from Iowa to an unforgiving farm in Nebraska with her husband, Will, a Civil War veteran. Their farm is a failure: there is always a drought or a plague of grasshoppers, and Abbie struggles beside Will in the fields. Tragically, she has to give up the music that nurtured her when she was younger, because she also raises the children and does the housework. After Will dies, her 18-year-old son John comes home to help her with the farm. (He hates farming.) Aldrich does not romanticize the never-ending struggle with the farm.

There are some joyful, funny bits, though. Here is a description of a picnic.

There were biscuits and pressed chickens, cakes and lemonade out on the side porch. Christine Reinmueller and Sarah Lutz took turns in shaking the fly-brush with its long paper streamers over the tables, so that no unusual number of flies would light on the food. There was only one queer thing about the whole affair, – a new dish among the refreshments which no one in the community had served before. Men folks going home asked their wives why in Sam Hill the potatoes were all cold…

(It was potato salad.)

In the sequel, A White Bird Flying, Aldrich focuses on Abbie’s children and grandchildren, who have easier lives in town. Only one granddaughter appreciates Abbie’s achievements and sacrifices.

Aldrich is not a great writer, but many of us love her. Her work is uneven, but she is good, sometimes very good, and her books are well-researched. A Lantern in Her Hand begins awkwardly but is historically important, a realistic book about a pioneer woman in the 19th century. It is well worth reading. It may not be her best, but it is the most read.