"Manuscript pages housed in the Herbert Hoover Library show how Wilder handwrote the stories and passed them to her daughter, who typed them up, making changes here and there. Their surviving correspondence reveals that they often discussed plot and details at length. To me, seeing this collaborative creative process come to light was only reassuring."

This Little House of Mine
Rachel F. Seidman

Coming to accept Wilder as a novelist was only the first step, and it was not painless. It didn't answer my biggest question, which was still, "How much of this is true?" Even though, as a historian, I know that one's memory is not always a reliable source, still I hoped to find reassurance that what she described was true to memory, at the very least.

I didn't always get what I wanted. As soon became clear, the earlier books deal with a period that predated Wilder's own memories. Laura Ingalls Wilder was sixty-five in 1932, when she published Little House in the Big Woods. She had started her writing life two decades earlier, in 1911, when she began publishing advice on a variety of farm topics in the local periodical, the Missouri Ruralist, and later became their home editor.

But Wilder's transition from farm wife to full-fledged author and novelist was drawn out. By 1915 her only child, Rose, was a successful newspaper reporter in San Francisco, where Wilder visited her and began to think about writing more herself. In the late 1920s she finished an autobiographical story called "Pioneer Girl," but could not find a publisher. She rewrote it, changed the narrator from first person to third person, broadened the story to include more about her whole family, and aimed it specifically at children. Thus the Little House series was born with the publication of Little House in the Big Woods in 1932.

By the time Wilder was writing about her family's life on the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, then, more than a generation had passed, and America was struggling through the Great Depression of the mid-twentieth. For the depiction of her family's life in the Big Woods and on the prairie, (actually the Osage Indian Reserve in southeastern Kansas), Wilder relied less on history, or even on memory, than on memories of memories: the stories her parents had told her of those years.

While Wilder was concerned in many cases with accuracy—for information about the Osage Indians, for instance, she returned to the area to conduct research and corresponded with historians—she did not hesitate to shift reality to suit the needs of fiction, or her pride. Referring to On the Banks of Plum Creek, she corresponded with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was helping edit the manuscript: "I have an awful suspicion that we drank plain creek water, in the raw, without boiling it or whatever. But that would make the reader think we were dirty, which we were not. So I said a spring. There could have been a spring near where Pa watered the oxen or there could be one near the plank footbridge. As it is located in my imagination, you may put it where it is most convenient."

How many other pieces of the story were added, or deleted, to avoid the charge of being "dirty" and why? The first part of the question probably can't be answered. Hints for the second may be located in the story of Wilder's adult life. Perhaps her concern with cleanliness grew out of her participation in the Progressive Era's home economics movement. She was an officer in the Missouri Home Development Association, which sought to bring a degree of scientific and professional expertise to farm women's work. As a child, I was not much interested in the grown-up Laura. Now, perhaps not surprisingly, the story of her life as an adult is a central piece of the puzzle for me.

And I'm not the only one; Wilder has puzzled many scholars. Her instruction to her daughter to locate the spring "where it is most convenient" raises a significant controversy in the world of Wilder experts. What exactly was the role played by Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was a professional writer? Early profiles of Wilder written after the initial success of the Little House books in the 1930s presented her as an untutored, natural writer with an amazing memory channeling and then jotting down her childhood experiences. The polished nature of the works suggested to some, therefore, that Lane must have been mainly responsible for their success as literature. But other scholars disagree. Recently Wilder's earlier writing, including her decade as a columnist for the Missouri Ruralist, and the travel diary she published of her own trip with her husband from Minnesota to Missouri, has been the focus of more attention. Clearly she had honed her craft before publishing the books that made her famous. With this background in mind, it becomes less surprising that Wilder could create her memorable books. Nevertheless, scholars agree that collaboration between mother and daughter was central to the process that gave birth to the series.

It doesn't much bother me to think of Rose having a hand in the stories. Maybe it's because I "knew" her as a baby in the last book, The First Four Years (found among Wilder's papers after her death and published in 1971). Or maybe it's because I think many authors get help, even if our literary culture doesn't like to admit it. Manuscript pages housed in the Herbert Hoover Library show how Wilder handwrote the stories and passed them to her daughter, who typed them up, making changes here and there. Their surviving correspondence reveals that they often discussed plot and details at length. To me, seeing this collaborative creative process come to light was only reassuring. I think students of writing are often shielded from the fact that most writers get help not only from editors, but from friends, writing groups, spouses, or partners. With Wilder and Lane, what in many other cases remains unseen has simply become more visible.