Reviewed by: Wild Rose: The Life and Times of Victor Marion Rose, Poet and Early Historian of Texas by Louise S. O’Connor Jillian Spivey Caddell Wild Rose: The Life and Times of Victor Marion Rose, Poet and Early Historian of Texas. By Louise S. O’Connor. Clayton Wheat Williams Texas Life Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 176. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-675-3.) In his eventful life, Victor Marion Rose penned books of poetry and Texas history and edited newspapers, and this biography by Louise S. O’Connor seeks to establish Rose’s place in the pantheon of southern writers. O’Connor’s project is deeply personal and richly researched. Rose’s descendant, she often cites her own archive of his works alongside interviews with fellow family members. She paints a nuanced portrait of a man whose flowery pen got him into and out of scrapes but who, O’Connor insists, “was one of the few people that could write about the times from an insider’s perspective” (p. 14). Wild Rose: The Life and Times of Victor Marion Rose, Poet and Early Historian of Texas positions Rose as an important witness to key events in Texas history, from the Civil War and the end of slavery to the shift from farming to ranching. Rose was born into an influential slave-owning Texas family in 1842. Given the backdrop of what O’Connor calls the “honor system of the south,” which she associates with “courage, strength, and violence (when necessary),” Rose was an anomaly more interested in poetry than in outdoor pursuits (pp. 29, 7). Yet in one of the many paradoxes of his life, he left college to fight for the Confederate army. Later, as he forged a career in letters and newspaper editing, he also was an alcoholic and womanizer. O’Connor at times struggles to balance her desire to venerate Rose as an underappreciated writer with the plain and sometimes unsavory facts of his biography. Wild Rose is most valuable as a work of Texas history. Rose’s life encapsulates many of the singular circumstances of nineteenth-century Texas. Descended from English immigrants, Rose encountered people of Mexican, German, Native American, and African American descent throughout his career. He lived through many of the state’s most tumultuous times and chronicled them as a historian and poet. The book is also an instructive lesson in nineteenth-century print cultures. As Rose flitted between literary genres and media after the Civil War, readers see the product of a century in which [End Page 494] new technologies and advancements in education made books and newspapers proliferate, even in locations far from the traditional U.S. centers of publication. O’Connor’s biography is less successful when it attempts to gloss broad social movements, such as the Old South and its racism. When Rose writes an African American character speaking in dialect, O’Connor explains that he does it “not only for humor but as a protection for his own, at times, unpopular ideas” (p. 75). Elsewhere O’Connor describes a piece in which Rose uses “‘watermelon eating and google-eyed’ descriptions of blacks,” before assuring her readers that “[h]e went on to rise above this take later” (p. 97). Rose’s abusive treatment of women is similarly acknowledged but shrugged away, as O’Connor writes that Rose “was seemingly attracted to women apparently not imbued with the ethics” he praised in his writing (p. 9). The author seems to want to have it both ways: Rose is depicted as both entrenched in his times and transgressive of them. One wishes that, instead of insisting on Rose’s exceptionalism, O’Connor had acknowledged how paradoxical yet typical many of Rose’s opinions were. Jillian Spivey Caddell University of Kent Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association
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Aug 20, 2020
Alexander Finkelstein 
Open Access