Rose Wilder Lane: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and secret collaborator

I was eight when we moved to Sonora, CA. It was my fourth school in five years and I wasn’t adjusting well.

Luckily, our new town had a library tucked into the Veteran’s Hall, right on Main Street, between our house and our dad’s newspaper office.

And luckily, Mrs. Hoe was at the desk there, looking out for lonely readers. She handed me Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the story of a girl like me: same age and name, and quite attached to a warm and wonderful father. I loved reading how that other Laura found her way in her new place.

The book was a lifeline.

I suppose it may have been my first binge experience: reading all the Little House books.

Not surprisingly, I was fascinated by the recent PBS show on American Masters, Laura Ingalls Wilder Prairie to Page. It begins by comparing Laura’s real childhood experiences to the Little House series’ stories, pointing out interesting discrepancies. As Laura said in her later years, “All I have told is the truth, but it is not the whole truth.”

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Illustrator Garth Williams used original photos like these of Grace, Mary and Laura Ingalls and ‘Pa’ Charles Ingalls to make his illustrations. They are recognizable in the book.

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But most interesting to me was to learn that the books were a collaboration between Laura and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Rose was an established author in her own right – penning magazine articles and fiction and non-fiction books – when she started working with her mother. Letters between Rose and Laura reveal how the Little House books were shaped by both women from conception to writing to editing.

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Writer Rose Wilder Lane was Laura and Almanzo Wilder’s only child who survived babyhood.

The TV show uses examples from when they were working on the manuscript for By the Shores of Silver Lake. Rose’s letters are written on an old-fashioned typewriter. She has good advice about inhabiting the main character: “This is Laura’s story. You must stay inside Laura. Try always to make sight, scent, sensation immediate. ‘So Laura took the lines in her hands,’ is better than ‘So Laura drove the black ponies.’ Get it all directly as sight, emotion, thought, scent. Don’t say, ‘It reminded Laura of other times.’ Say, ‘This was like other times.’ Stay inside Laura.”

In another letter, Rose infers the collaboration did not always sit well with her mom. Rose wrote: “You are one of the few writers in the country who would turn down a collaboration with RWL – But go ahead! You certainly are handling the material much better all the time and if you don’t want this book touched, you are absolutely right to not have it touched.”

At issue? Rose advised against including the heartbreaking, true-to-life storyline about Mary going blind. Laura wrote back in her slanted scrawl on lined paper: “A touch of tragedy makes the story truer to life and showing the way we all took it illustrates the spirit of the times and the frontier.”

If you are a Little House fan, you will remember how Mary’s blindness is a poignant part of the book.

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Almanzo James Wilder, b. Feb. 1857, d. Oct. 1949, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, b. Feb. 1867, d. Feb 1957. When they married in 1885, he supported her decision to leave a promise to obey out of the wedding vows. Their marriage lasted 64 years, until his death.

More from Rose to her mom: “As to similarity in our writing, of course. You often write lines and whole paragraphs that I feel are what I would have written or anyway I had. What you haven’t developed is structure, a kind of under-rhythm in the whole body of the writing, and a ‘pointing up’ here and there. English is an impressionistic language, an onomatopoeic language. It has a quality of a sunrise or a landscape, a meaning in feeling. Essentially, it is poetry.”

I love thinking of language as sunrise or landscape; as the atmosphere it creates.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1932, when she was 63. Other books in the series followed until 1943. She received $500 in her first check from Harpers and a substantially larger check every time after, which eased the Wilders’ income worries for the first time in their marriage.

The TV show says Rose denied any connection to the Little House books until her dying day. Apparently she did not want the act of writing for children to taint her adult publishing career. Her own best-known book is non-fiction: The Discovery of Freedom, an early work that laid the foundation for the Libertarian party.

The show includes a discussion of the issue of racial prejudice in the Little House books, noting Laura was the first recipient of the ALA’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement award in 1954. In 2018 the ALA changed the name of this award to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award in light of parts of the Little House books that are “dehumanizing to children of color and send damaging messages to white children.”

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Laura and Almanzo Wilder moved to Rocky Ridge Farm in 1894, a fresh start after difficult years that included financial struggles, a barn that burned to the ground and the death of a baby son. They lived at Rocky Ridge until Almanzo’s death in 1949 and hers in 1957. The farm is one of many Laura Ingalls Wilder homes — including many of the ‘Little Houses’ – that can be visited today.

Lousie Erdrich characterizes the Little House books as “valorizing things that destroyed entire peoples in this country.” As an adult, I see that and am sickened. Still, when I am asked what books made a big difference in my childhood, Little House in the Big Woods belongs on the list. My adult self sees things differently, but my child self remembers walking into the library’s cool brick building on a hot September afternoon and finding Mrs. Hoe in her crisp white high-collared blouse, doing her best with the books at hand to offer a little bibliotherapy to a lonely kid.

For these past six years and three picture books, I have collaborated with my sister Kate McGee on illustration. I have benefited from the insights of a second brain and a second artistic sense to clarify each project, as well as Kate’s sense of color and innate good cheer. I hope Rose and Laura got some of that, too.

Note: The TV show is 90 minutes and covers lots, lots more. You can access it on demand.

Let’s escape…

The last two weeks have been doozies (since I was born in 1906, I get to say that… jk which is a newer bit of slang). Anyway, I’m not feeling like being very serious right now. So let’s escape. In my collection of images about books and reading there are lots of repeating motifs and themes–books and cats, reading and cafes, books and beds, books and birds, reading and women, etc.–but probably the overwhelming theme is escape into another world, into self, into peace.

So this week let’s go. Let’s run away together.

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Illustration by Julie Albade

Illustration by Iker Ayerstaran

Illustration by Tuylek

Illustration by Joost Swarte

Illustration by Caroline Magerl

Illustration by Javier Naverette

Photo by Hesham Alhumaid

Illustration by Pawel Kuczynski

Illustration by Achiki

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli

Illustrator not known (anybody recognize?)

Illustration by Remy Coutarel

2021: Three Favors, One Resolution

Yes, it’s 2021! Hallelujah!

There’s light at the end of that long tunnel called 2020, and as I emerge into that light I’m going to ask 2021 for three favors.

FIRST:

It’s easy for me to forget I live in my whole body because I spend a lot of time in my head. I suspect that’s true for a lot of us who love to write and love to read and who make the time to do it. But inside our heads can be a dark place, too – not dark as in frightening, but dark as in isolating. It’s important to remember the delivery system for our brains involves our lungs, bones, blood, and skin. Without them the inside of our heads go completely dark. As in kaput. My mortality is not something I need to be thinking about all the time, but reminders (there have been plenty this year) like Covid-19 push me out of my head into the open air, send me out into the neighborhood or over to the beach for walks and fresh air. More, more, more of this, 2021, are you listening? Help push me out the door.

SECOND:

To feel creative, I first need a little noise. Not a lot. But I’m at my happiest if there are people moving around, some chatter, doors opening and closing, kids playing, the goings and comings of a real world, the scene turning over in a kind of tidal way, bit by bit, as I watch and listen. Noise – the kind you get at a good coffee shop. The kind you get when you’re walking down a street in Rome, London, Paris, San Francisco, Oaxaca, anyplace new that’s filled with people. The kind you get in a public market or when you’re singing with a choir. Later, silence is fine. But first, give me a world that’s boisterous and rambunctious. I’m looking forward to more noise, 2021, please!

THIRD:

Who knew that it was possible to miss touching people? To miss giving someone a little kiss to say hello, hugging them to say goodbye. Shaking hands when you say, “Nice to meet you.” Sitting down next to someone else, not worried about the distance between you. Such an undervalued thing until this last year. Proximity. Rubbing shoulders. Touch. I long for that most basic and most lovely of our senses, 2021. So please, more.

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There’s one other thing, but I have to thank 2020 for it. Last year helped me remember that the word “essential” applies to just about everyone who works hard to make our daily lives work, often without the respect they deserve. So I’ll toss in this one resolution, after asking for three favors: I’m going to remember, 2021, to let those essential workers know whenever I can how grateful I am.