What I learned today

In the Little House books, "the character of Nellie [Oleson] was based on three different girls Laura knew in real life. One [Nellie Owens] was a storekeeper's daughter in Walnut Grove; the second [Genevieve Masters] was the first girl's school-yard rival, a spoiled girl from New York (and like the Nellie of the books, she wound up at a school in South Dakota a few years later). The third [Stella Gilbert] was a girl whose family homesteaded outside De Smet and for a while had competed with Laura for Almanzo's attention: she was the one who'd come along on the buggy rides until Laura finally made Almanzo choose, just as she did in These Happy Golden Years. The fact that Nellie wasn't any one person but rather a composite of three of the real Laura's antagonists' worst traits makes her even more terrifying, some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts." ~ from the excellent forthcoming book The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure