Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

In Laura’s world, there were no leftovers or seconds. When they left the little house near Independence, Kansas, the Ingallses even dug up the seed potatoes growing in their garden. Every physical possession was something precious, but not necessarily vital. What they could not buy, they traded for crops or furs. Glass windows, bathrooms, and swift transportation are fundamental necessities to us, but they were luxuries to a people who produced almost everything they needed themselves, relying only peripherally on items purchased at far-away stores. As a result, Laura’s family was fiercely independent and self-confident, answering the call of western expansion again and again as they made their own mark on the frontier.

Laura’s life may have been simple in terms of material possessions, but it wasn’t easy. The years following her marriage to Almanzo Wilder were fraught with trouble. At first, all signs pointed to a happy, unruffled marriage. Almanzo, whom Laura called Manly, was a successful farmer and horse breeder with rich relatives, and Laura was an adept housekeeper and a smart manager used to deprivation and simple living. But nothing could have prepared the newlyweds for the disastrous years that lay ahead. Almanzo fell ill with diphtheria, forcing a long separation from their young daughter Rose and partially paralyzing him for the remainder of his life. The couple’s next child, a boy, died before he was a month old; their house burned down; and a drought dried up any hopes of financial prosperity. The couple moved around in a futile search for land that could sustain them, taking on odd jobs as they went and raising Rose with a sense of constant inferiority and poverty.

Eventually, the Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, forcing its unforgiving terrain into submission over many long years of toil and labor. By the time Laura was moved to write about her childhood, the hard years were finally over, and the couple had been living in relative security, if not full financial bloom, for years. Rose was a successful writer who traveled the world; even Laura wrote regularly as a columnist on poultry farming and rural life for the Missouri Ruralist.

It wasn’t until the onset of the increasingly dire circumstances of the Great Depression that Laura really began thinking about simpler times. There was something familiar about this new era of poverty and uncertainty, something that resonated with the Ingallses’ own roving years. Laura’s family had never had much, but they had always managed to eke out a slight living and stay together. This courage and tenacity seemed especially suited to Depression-era life, with its privations and pressing needs. It had been years since Laura saw such widespread unemployment, hunger, and want. Now, combined with her mother’s death, these reduced circumstances made her look backward to the experiences of her pioneer childhood. Laura, who was in her early sixties, began to write a memoir she called Pioneer Girl, a first-person manuscript detailing her family’s westward journey. In 1930, she showed the book to her journalist daughter for her opinion, and before she knew it, Laura was adapting passages for a children’s book tentatively titled When Grandma Was a Little Girl.

It can be easy to confuse the real Laura with the Laura of her books, to mistake the Little House on the Prairie series for a sweet tale of churning butter and stomping on hay. At the time of their publication, nobody had ever really undertaken what Laura achieved with such success: a series of books aimed at children that re-created a historical period in such vivid and compelling detail. Succeed she did, but not by telling life exactly as it was. In fact, the books were written over thirteen contentious, uneasy years marked by a decidedly complex relationship with her grown daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Though Rose’s role in the creation of the Little House books has gained acknowledgment in recent years, many Laura fans have no idea of the degree to which she influenced both the form and success of her mother’s—fictitious—life story.

Throughout the process of crafting the book, Laura drew upon her daughter for editorial and moral support. By this time, Rose was a restless, resentful woman still full of memories of the poverty and restriction of childhood and frustrated by what she saw as her mother’s lack of literary sophistication. Family ties didn’t turn Rose into a permissive editor; in fact, the editorial letters that survive are brutal, reflecting a lack of sympathy for her mother’s literary talent guaranteed to leave an acidic taste in fans’ mouths. Rose felt compelled to force the work into the literary image of the day; Laura struggled to live up to her daughter’s high standards. Mother and daughter both fought to get their version on the page, collaborating and clashing as they gave simultaneous birth to one of literature’s great coups.

Unbeknownst to Laura, Rose was committing a sort of literary heresy even as she helped her mother craft her first novel for children. Little House in the Big Woods appeared in 1931 to acclaim and good reviews, and Rose’s novel Let the Hurricane Roar appeared in 1932. An adult novel following the adventures of a couple named Caroline and Charles as they confront the American West (sound familiar?), the book became a best seller. Though some have suggested that the book was another collaboration between Laura and Rose, more recent works have hinted that Laura had no idea Rose was plundering, even plagiarizing, her unpublished memoir for her own gain. However she felt personally about the book, which was a Depression-era success story in itself, Laura remained silent. We’ll never know her true feelings on Rose’s betrayal, only that she set them aside in favor of her increasing compulsion to continue her life story. She turned her attention to the next book in the series, then the next, creating and re-creating her frontier childhood for a popular audience.

My favorite Little House book has always been The Long Winter, which fictionalizes the Ingallses’ struggle during the Snow Winter of 1880-81. It’s not a cheerful book per se, but you wouldn’t be cheerful if you had lived through that winter, either. Plagued by blizzards and cut off from the railroads for a solid five months by blinding snow and perpetual storms, the residents of De Smet, South Dakota, survived temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero. The tiny prairie town depended on the railroads for supplies and dry goods; both were stuck behind snow drifts for months on end, until the town’s residents were forced to eat their seed wheat or starve.

Laura’s fictional account of the winter that almost killed her family is deceptively simple. Though the Ingalls family actually had a young married couple with a baby on the way living with them at the time, Laura chose to write about the family as if they’d survived the winter alone and in utter isolation. Her story of survival and basic instinct takes simplicity to a new extreme. With no firewood and no way of going out for supplies, the family must burn straw they twist into little sticks in their stove for warmth. There’s no school, no social activity of any kind, just the monotony of survival. Laura and her sisters crowd around the kitchen table and recite their lessons by day; at night, they sing songs and tell stories for entertainment. With nothing but axle grease for lamp oil, they create a makeshift lamp out of a button and some fabric. When they’re not studying or entertaining one another, they bend over a coffee mill, grinding seed wheat into flour for the coarse brown bread that sustains them for months.

Even given the nightmarish circumstances it depicts, there’s a humanity and a sense of dignity in the pages of The Long Winter that made quite an impression on a little girl who had never seen snow. Stripped of any outside landscape and denied the few comforts to which they have become accustomed, the Ingalls family gets down to basics, and the simple task of living takes up most of their time. Their struggle against the elements is one of waiting, but also one of angry confrontation. Though their relationships with one another are severely restrained by the mores and expectations of 1880s ladies and gentlemen, each member of the Ingalls family loses their patience at some point. Even gentle Ma almost breaks under the knowledge that the train will not come until the blizzards stop.