#(now i've just accepted that american history is full of freemasons)

[fictionadventurer]

After very little research into the other writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, my hypothesis about the Little House authorship question is that the writing is mostly Rose's, but the heart is Laura's.

In Laura's newspaper columns, the parts that sound most like Little House mostly come from the extracts she shares from Rose's letters (incidentally, it's kind of adorable how proud she is of Rose: "My daughter's in France!", "My daughter's in Albania!", etc.) The prose of Old Home Town, Rose's inspired-by-my-childhood-home novel, has some of the same concise descriptive prose that I've come to associate with the Little House style (I could hear passages in the voice of the Little House audiobook narrator).

Yet the Little House soul is all over Laura's columns. She's fascinated by the simple tasks of life, believes in home and family and hard work, believes in holding onto the goodness of childhood and looking forward with hope toward the future. There's an optimism, almost a romanticism, about life. The children's series that bears her name clearly comes from the same woman.

Rose, by contrast, is much more pessimistic. When writing about childhood, she's almost cynical about the life of a small town. She highlights the dark stories underlying the wholesome exterior, is extremely sensitive to the pitfalls of the social scene around her. Part of the difference is that Rose is writing for adults, but there does seem to be an essential difference in the personality behind the pen, despite the stylistic similarities to Little House.

(At the risk of pop psychoanalyzing people long dead, Rose seems much more neurotic and introverted and sensitive than her mother. In her writings and in the books about her childhood in Missouri, she comes across as child of a fairly comfortable modern life, with all the modern anxieties, in contrast to a woman who grew up starving on the prairie and knows that there are much worse things to endure than small-town gossip).

It's not much of a thesis, but I'm just fascinated by the fact that the Little House series can share so many stylistic similarities with Rose's writings, yet feel so much more like Laura.

#little house #laura ingalls wilder #rose wilder lane #i did not finish old home town because it came uncomfortably close to deal-breaking swearing and i don't feel like dealing with that #but the book was interesting in its way #rose clearly has an agenda about women's rights #but in focusing so heavily on social justice it loses a lot of heart #if the mother is supposed to be based in any way on laura she's a bit harsh as a mother #though more open-minded than her neighbors #(always standing up for the gossiped-about women) #rose's stand-in (i'm going to assume it's a stand-in because cranford has trained me to assume #(that any first-person narrator in a book based on the author's childhood hometown is a self-insert) #kind of disappears into the background #and it's very tempting to consider how the woman who made her living as a ghostwriter disappeared behind others' stories #(also this book unfortunately seems to confirm that almanzo was a mason) #(sorry mom) #(seeing the freemason symbol on pa's grave was my most terrifying moment as a catholic little house fan) #(i'm pretty sure my mom threw holy water on it) #(took me a few years to get over that) #(now i've just accepted that american history is full of freemasons) #(and as long as she's not spouting anti-catholic propaganda her books are fair game)