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

Ma threw up her hands and dropped into a chair…. “Patience?” Ma exclaimed. “Patience! What’s his patience got to do with it, I’d like to know!”

But even as they momentarily lose control, the Ingalls family knows it must cling together to survive. When Laura complains of being tired of brown bread with nothing on it, Ma is quick to chasten her: “Don’t complain, Laura!… Never complain of what you have. Always remember you are fortunate to have it.”

The Ingallses don’t have much to be grateful for, but their focus on small blessings in the face of unthinkable deprivation gives the book its sweetest moments. The family’s few possessions and creature comforts are admittedly small by modern standards, but their relative lack of complaint seems designed to undercut a culture where a throttled Netflix queue or a choppy cell phone connection can seem like a cosmic misfortune of epic proportions. But the fact that they have survived together means more than any material possession or outward congratulations. And their celebrations focus on the most simple gift of all: the gift of a heart that beats and lungs that breathe. A book about death and threat ends up affirming and clarifying simple daily life under the most extreme of circumstances.

For fourteen-year-old Laura, the book is about more than surviving harsh weather conditions. The Long Winter tests her growing spirit, pitting her against those closest to her in a struggle to remain patient and calm and to fulfill what she knows is her duty. Life was surely less complicated in a society in which the rules of success were so clear. Given a sweet disposition, a strong faith, and a womanly manner, a pioneer girl has everything she needs to move forward. But Laura can’t or won’t fit into that mold. She is challenged by the circumstances around her and by an internal rebellion that constantly threatens the family unit. This struggle to simultaneously belong and break away is all too familiar to anyone who didn’t grow up gracefully. And if Laura doesn’t exactly learn patience, she learns that her family has what it needs to sustain itself.

Laura the woman was no stranger to privation and insecurity. The Little House books she struggled to write did not entirely heal the rifts with her daughter, but they went a long way toward restoring the love and collegiality at the center of their relationship. When she finished writing the series at last, Laura knew she could rest. Her work was done; she had given something far larger than herself to her daughter and to the generations yet to discover a bit of themselves on Laura’s own vast, remembered prairie.

For Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Great Depression wasn’t a jarring shock. It was a reminder of the simpler, less materialistic days of her childhood, days when one flickering lamp held together a family, outshining her personal desires. After the profligate 1920s, the ‘30s must have seemed more comfortable to Laura, who struggled with modernity throughout her adult life. Even in her old age, her first impulse when financial difficulty arose was to cut off the electricity to the house. She had lived so long without it that it must have seemed like an easily expendable luxury.

Should modern readers give up every comfort in simplicity’s name? Of course not, but a reading of The Long Winter is a good reminder not to let mere things interfere with our heroines’ duties. For Laura, simplicity was a way of life in which the luxurious always gave way to the essential. Today’s heroine has much to learn from a world in which things like heat and food consumed so much time and energy. There just isn’t time to worry about bigger houses, better clothing, or fancier job titles when you’re trying to figure out how to stretch your meager supplies just one more week. When we focus on people and life instead of material possessions and mere wants, there’s not much room for emotional hand-wringing. Instead, there’s more space to weigh what we value in our lives and to acknowledge what really counts. For Laura and her family, simplicity meant paring down until the foundations of life—family, freedom, nothing but the nonnegotiables—were laid bare.

If you’re like me, you’ve yearned for simplicity for as long as you can remember. I was a Laura Ingalls-worshipping, bonnet-wearing eight-year-old right around the time when I began to sense that my family wasn’t perfect after all, that my teachers were humans and not gods, that my neighborhood was surrounded by crime and poverty, and that we ourselves would never have all or be all that we could. But the same parents I screamed at and railed against were the people who helped me turn my wood-paneled toy wagon into a covered one, who let me go off and find myself even when they disapproved of the means, the destination, and the young woman I flirted with becoming. It’s contradictions like these that send a heroine under the comforter with a good book, one that evokes simpler times.

The simple life still has its challenges. Simplicity must coexist with life’s shadowy gray areas, those nooks and crannies of imperfection, struggle, and toil designed to drive a heroine mad. Perhaps Laura’s own struggle with a complicated family situation and her decidedly complex relationship with comfort, money, and survival drove her to write works that hearken back to a time of simplicity and grace. Even so, her books challenge modern readers with their intolerant, racist depictions of Native Americans and their decidedly conservative bent, yet another example of the murky territory many literary heroines are called to populate.

Thankfully for us, the Little House on the Prairie books far transcend the gentle reminiscences of an old woman, however weathered by the world. The simplicity they evoke has nothing to do with age or time. Hailing from an era we have little hope of ever experiencing or understanding, they reach across history and tap into a universal longing for calm, serenity, space, and simplicity. Like the pioneer girls who came before us, we crave community, human contact, the chance to prove ourselves as we survive our own long winters. It’s easy to lose sight of what really counts in a time so taken with material possessions and fickle fortunes, a time when worrying about bank account balances and precarious markets has been prioritized somewhere between waking up in the morning and voting. Luckily, Laura’s there to remind us that sometimes all you need is the flicker of a fire and the companionship of those you love. Life is never simple, but we can strive to make it so.

READ THIS BOOK:

• While on road trips, preferably during stops due to inclement weather

• In a warm bathtub

• When you’re tempted to buy something you absolutely don’t need

• While nursing a finicky baby

LAURA’S LITERARY SISTERS:

• Hattie Brooks in Hattie Big Sky, by Kirby Larson

• Ántonia Shimerda in My Ántonia, by Willa Cather

• The sisters from Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family

Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË,

JANE EYRE

All too often, the lives of authors we love read like a litany of disappointment, grief, and misery. Charlotte Brontë's story is no exception. For the first thirty-two years of her life she was beaten down by circumstance and devastated by failure after failure. She clung to her family, only to see her two elder sisters die of malnutrition and tuberculosis. She attended school and went out into the world, struggling and failing at the only jobs available to her—governess and teacher—so she returned home, and watched her family fall apart before her eyes. And she wrote, only to see her work skewered as coarse, immoral, and unwomanly.