Post #101 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Susan Wittig Albert’s Novel: Good Reading for Memoir Writers
[NOTE: For more information about A Wilder Rose be sure to watch the book trailer video at the end of this article.]
A Wilder Rose: Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Their Little Houses
Reviewed by Lanie Tankard
“At night when she came home, the morning’s roses were faded and their petals were scattering on the wind.”
—Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie (Chapter VI: The Month of Roses)
Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote that rosy sentence in her beloved Little House book series. Or…did she? Some scholars have long suggested that Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, had an unacknowledged hand in forming the stories. Who actually put pen to paper to deliver an iconic pioneer life for several generations of readers?
Susan Wittig Albert became curious and set out to research the answer. That question became the crux of Albert’s new book, A Wilder Rose
Not only does Albert probe the involvement of Lane in the formation of the Little House volumes, but she also suggests reasons for the absence of Lane’s name on the covers. Albert composes an absorbing plot told in a manner just as compelling as those in the Little House volumes, at least for readers like me who knew Wilder’s life only from her books and were clueless about what happened to baby Rose when she grew up.
Lane became a well-known author herself, and an acknowledged editor. By combining stories of the two women, Albert probes mother/daughter relationships, author/editor/agent ties, and the writing process itself. While the story unfolds from Lane’s perspective, Albert works in her own explanations and theories.
And Albert’s in the catbird seat for such a task. She’s the founder of Story Circle Network and a prolific author—by my count: 41 works of fiction, 12 more coauthored with her husband (Bill Albert), 5 nonfiction, and 2 edited anthologies. Her experience thus allows her to portray the life of a successful writer by having lived one herself.
The story ranges far afield from the frontier, for Wilder and Lane were anything but two peas in a pod. Laura’s milieu consisted of Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakota Territory, South Dakota, and a brief stint in Florida. Rose rambled: Dakota Territory, Minnesota, Florida, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, California, France, Albania, Soviet Union, New York, Texas, Connecticut, and Vietnam.
A Wilder Rose
In addition, Lane helped plant the individualist roots of the present-day libertarian movement. Albert examines individualism and collectivism to illustrate Lane’s developing ideas.
A Wilder Rose shifts back and forth in time and tense, which can be confusing in places. Chapters alternate from a third-person description of Lane’s past life to the first-person voice of Lane. In those sections, she interacts with a younger writer visiting from time to time, Norma Lee Browning, who implores Lane to tell bits of her backstory. Wilder walks on and offstage throughout, as Lane struggles with their relationship.
“My mother has always been a mystery to me,” Lane tells Browning. Albert offers far less on the father/daughter connection, but the reader comes away with the distinct impression that Lane was not a fangirl of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I’ve always cherished those Little House books. I read them growing up, and I read them aloud to my three daughters. Part of the reason they still mean so much to me is that they tell classic frontier tales of a woman and her family as a territory is being carved out. My mother and her parents were pioneer settlers, too, in Kansas and Alabama. So Wilder’s stories help me visualize what those who came before me had to endure in taming uncultivated land and creating a community.
Indeed, many locales have honored their settlers by establishing various types of living history museums. One can visit the Wilder locales of Rocky Ridge, Walnut Grove, De Smet, Pepin, and Burr Oak. My daughters all attended summer workshops at Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farms in Austin, Texas, where they grew up. I’ve taken them to Kansas to see where their great grandparents farmed after they emigrated from Germany, between Wamego and Alma. And we’ve gone to the Baldwin County Heritage Museum in Elberta, Alabama, where their grandmother at eighteen months of age helped her father clear stumps from the land they would farm.
To be among the earliest residents in a place that’s still wilderness took fortitude to stick it out. One had to make do with what one had on hand. My grandmother wove baskets out of pine needles, braided rugs out of rags, made picture frames from pine cone scales, tatted lace, canned and preserved, milked cows, confronted wild critters…and on and on until sunset when she fell into bed weary with contentment—just as this sentence from Wilder’s The First Four Years sums up:
“The days passed busily and pleasantly.”
That’s what the drama in Wilder’s books has always portrayed for me. Reading Albert’s A Wilder Rose somewhat dashed my idyllic mental image of life lived in those little houses. I felt sadness for the Wilder of my imagination, and quite frankly…I felt far less empathy for Lane. Why did I feel a greater kinship with the mother yet also admire the feminist accomplishments of the adult daughter? That conundrum is not a criticism of Albert’s portrayal of Lane, for she worked directly from Lane’s own diaries. It’s simply how I viewed the protagonist as I was reading.
So why wasn’t Lane’s name on the books as coauthor? Albert proffers a debt of guilt felt by Lane for two past actions, a debt that Albert conjectures gave the daughter a reluctant sense of obligation to assist her mother on the Little House stories when Wilder began writing her memoir on paper tablets. Lane reshaped the stories Wilder handed her after the publisher rejected the first one, and then Lane typed them out. Lane had connections in the publishing world, and used them for the Little House series that began streaming forth.
Albert’s delineation of this work relationship pits Lane as an editor resentful of the time it took away from her own writing while at the same time wanting to spice up her mother’s prose with drama, against Wilder as a proud author who kept declaring she only wanted to tell the truth in her own words and skip the theatrics. Yet even though Laura’s stories snagged the eyes of publishers, her own words were not strong enough to bring them to the printed page without Rose’s silent polishing.
As Albert points out, neither woman could have predicted that what began as just one book and then gradually grew into a cottage industry could ever have mushroomed into the lengthy list of spinoff titles that exists today—and that’s not even counting the television series.
[Use this link if you prefer the Kindle version of A Wilder Rose.]
After reading Albert’s A Wilder Rose, I turned to my copy of Little Town on the Prairie, a first edition that my Aunt Gert gave to me long ago. My intention was to peruse. It was hard to put down. I got so caught up in the narrative that I sat totally mesmerized well into the wee hours rereading the entire book in one sitting, wondering which writer I was actually encountering—Laura or Rose.
Here was the intrigue of elementary-school girls colluding in spite against the newcomer, boys teasing the teacher, a bright child bored out of her mind questioning the teacher’s approach and being punished for it—all rendered with minimalist simplicity in a writing voice that still echoes. It reminded me of E.B. White and Joan Didion, who spend words as if each one were a gold Krugerrand and yet create eloquence on every understated page. I had never before noticed the infusion of political views in the Little House series, and began examining the other volumes with my newfound insights from Albert’s book.
However these stories came to be, they needed to be told. Not only do the tales represent the iconic frontier life for later generations to read, but they also gave hope to struggling people during the beleaguered times in which the books were first published. Reading Little House tenets such as “everything is evened up in time” and “the creed of her pioneer forefathers that ‘it is better farther on’” must have soothed their Depression-era economic lacerations like balm when the volumes began appearing in the early 1930s.
The Little House series holds up a strong female role model for young women in Laura Ingalls Wilder. Susan Wittig Albert’s new work not only acknowledges Lane’s contributions to that series but also brings forth another strong female role model in Rose Wilder Lane. Photos would have been a nice addition to Albert’s volume, but they do add to the cost of production and securing permissions is often difficult.
I’m hard pressed to come up with another mother/daughter duo whose lives and words have had such impacts on American life and society. By donning rose-colored glasses to let us see Laura Ingalls Wilder through her daughter’s eyes, Susan Wittig Albert now gives well-researched recognition to both women. I do wonder what an enthusiastic mother/daughter team working together wholeheartedly, with dual authorship credit from the start, might have produced…but, that was not to be.
Albert’s book illustrates clearly that the Little Houses we’ve all come to know and love have BOTH voices intertwined. Could either woman alone have fashioned such a legacy? You’ll have to read A Wilder Rose and draw your own conclusions.
Lanie Tankard is a freelance writer and editor in Austin, Texas. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews, she has also been an editorial writer for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.
