As you might guess, this is a book about a book, The Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum. Actually, it is about the wife of L Frank Baum, a woman by the name of Maud Gage Baum, who had a rather eventful life. While this is a book of historical fiction, the author did a lot of historical research, of both the eras represented, and the protagonist.
The story alternates between the late 1930’s, when Maud is hoping to ensure that her husband’s vision is not completely changed in the process of making a movie based on his beloved book, and Maud’s life, beginning in the 1870’s. She is the daughter of a prominent suffragette, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Her early life is greatly shaped by her mother’s influence. After she meets and marries Frank Baum, her life changes drastically from what she had assumed her life would be like, for good and bad. The parts of the book dealing with her married life take her from her home town in upstate New York, to traveling with a theatrical production, to frontier Dakota Territory, to Chicago, and ultimately to Hollywood. While there may not be a lot of detail about her day-to-day life in each location, there is enough to show how drastically one’s location, and to some degree, income, impacted how they lived.
This is almost two separate books. The sections based on the making of a movie in the late 1930’s are interesting, especially if you are a fan of The Wizard of Oz. Maud’s life with Frank, and the aspects of their lives that influenced his book, are what tie the disparate parts together. The author’s research included not just books written about Maud’s husband, but also her sister’s diaries. Maud’s older sister Julia lived a hardscrabble life on the Dakota frontier, and her diaries are in the State Historical Society of North Dakota. I would not have thought about reading the diary of someone not related to me, or to someone I was researching, but the ones available do shine a light on what our ancestor’s lives might have been like.
If this was your family, how would you research them? You might be able to find diaries written by contemporaries of your ancestors in historical societies in states where they lived. College libraries and local or regional libraries with strong historical or genealogical collections might also have holdings of interest. L Frank Baum may have been a good writer, but he apparently had difficulty earning a living before the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. To follow your ancestor’s career, see if they moved frequently, or changed job titles or fields. The census will help with the first, and local directories, which can be found at Ancestry, FamilySearch, or local libraries or historical societies, might help you learn about the second. Compare the occupation listed in the census with the listing in the directory.