There is no better get for the true “Little House” geek than a hard-to-find copy of “Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography” by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill.
“Pioneer Girl” was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first take on her memoir, written with an adult audience in mind. When it failed to find a publisher at the time, Laura and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane each mined it for material. Rose did so (once apparently without her mother’s knowledge, and later with her consent) for novels that found success at the time, and Laura (with her daughter’s editorial help) for what we now know as the “Little House” series.
This annotated version is the first chance the mainstream reader has had to read Laura’s original words about her pioneer childhood. That alone may be enough to entice fans, but in the hands of Ms. Hill, the editor, and with what was clearly an enormous effort by the staff at the South Dakota State Historical Society, the book offers much more. In extensive footnotes that comprise more of the book than Laura’s actual text, readers can follow three additional concurrent journeys: the fictionalized Ingalls’ families travels; the history of the time, which is sometimes inconsistent with Laura’s memory and at other times enhances our understanding of what she was experiencing; and the editorial path from a single manuscript, handwritten in pencil on four Fifty Fifty and two Big Chief lined tablets, to the books we’ve come to love.
It’s enough to make any reader say, “Squeeee!” and do a happy dance, and that’s exactly what I did when I found it in my bookstore, paid $39.95, and sat by the pool with my rather awkward purchase, reading happily. I also reached out to Ms. Hill to invite her to answer questions about what it was like to edit a book that is bound to thrill and challenge Laura’s legions of fans. One of the first things she told me is that publishers were surprised by the interest in the book, but have since printed more copies, meaning that you too should be able to put your hands on one. Here is the rest of our conversation:
Q.
What exactly is the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript at the heart of this book?
A.
It’s Laura’s original autobiography, based on her handwritten manuscript with all of the typos and quirks. She wasn’t worried about spelling and grammar in this rough draft. She was just trying to get all of her story down on paper. There are other, edited versions that she and Rose sent to agents and publishers, but I chose to use this one.
Q.
There’s sort of a longstanding literary theory that Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t really write the books at all, that they were written by Rose Wilder Lane. You put that to rest here and in your biography of Laura, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life.” Why do you think it persists?
A.
I think the idea that Laura didn’t write her own books persists because William Holtz made a persuasive case against her in “The Ghost in the Little House.” He started the re-examination of the authorship of the Little House books and because the story was so sensational it really took root. Then, too, because at their core her books are really about honesty and integrity the suggestion that she wasn’t the sole author really undermined her credibility as a writer and a novelist, and some people were eager to discredit her.
“Pioneer Girl” itself really builds the case for Laura’s authorship because readers can see her raw talent. If you look at the original rough draft you can see she has a long way to go as a novelist, but you can also see that the characters are there. The description is there. You can see whole chunks, especially of dialogue, that she lifted from “Pioneer Girl” and placed into the Little House books. Her voice is there, too, and that’s really one of the things that makes the books so special. It’s also illuminating to look at the whole body of letters between Laura and Rose as the books evolved. They’re editorial letters.
Q.
Was it surprising, reading the correspondence about how they shaped the narrative? Between them, Laura and Rose chose to leave out a lot of the Ingalls’s family travels and some of their history.
A.
Reading it was a revelation. You recognize immediately that they’re working together to try to shape memorable, dynamic, engaging fiction for children. It’s very encouraging, especially given that longstanding perception that Rose was essentially a ghost writer. It’s clear that she was an editor — an aggressive editor, but an editor who helped her mother grow and develop as a writer. It was very exciting.
Q.
Was any of it disillusioning?
A.
What was a shock was reading the rough-draft version and realizing that some elements I assumed were absolutely factual and true were not. In “Pioneer Girl,” when Pa trades the horses, Pet and Patty, for larger horses, he trades Jack, too: “because Jack wanted to stay with Pet and Patty as he always did Pa gave him to the man that had them.”
Pa trades Jack with the horses! I had to reread that passage several times, because I was reading Laura’s handwritten version on microfilm. I thought, I can’t be reading it correctly, because Jack stays with the family all the way to Plum Creek!
I love Jack. He’s a a perfect canine character. But he was primarily fictional. That was kind of an emotional literary upheaval for me. But it immediately increased my respect for Laura as a novelist. She can really bend and mold and create characters, and she was a better and stronger writer than I realized. Her voice is so deceptively simple—like she’s just setting down on paper what actually happened. It feels effortless and easy. But when we look behind the veil we can see that she was really committed to getting that voice right. It requires a real craft and vision and dedication to get that perfect pitch. The reader can’t imagine the narrative unfolding any differently.
Q.
Who was the most satisfying character to track down?
A.
Tracking the three different Nellies — the three women she used to create her. My publisher’s editorial staff found photographs of all three and they’re all beautiful. I loved being able to see them and share them.
Q.
Was Nellie Oleson really as mean as she is in the books?
A.
There’s no way to know that at all! You just look at the photographs and wonder.
Q.
As I read your introduction and notes, it’s like you know these women. And they seem to have such a strong relationship with each other. Did you feel that to be true?
A.
I think the relationship was complicated. In much of the correspondence, we have this mostly warm and affectionate relationship, but Rose rails against her mother in her journal. And very early on it’s clear there was a great deal of rivalry and pain. Rose published “Let the Hurricane Roar,” a novel that was really based on parts of “Pioneer Girl,” shortly after Wilder’s first novel (“Little House in the Big Woods”) was published, and from Rose’s own accounts, it’s clear that she didn’t tell her mother that she was working on it, or that she had dipped into “Pioneer Girl” material.
But then just a few years later while Laura was writing “By the Shores of Silver Lake,” after the success of the first Little House books, she was helping Rose very openly with her second novel, “Free Land,” based on “Pioneer Girl.”
I feel like Laura had nurtured this idea of a professional writing life for a long time. She and Rose launched their careers at about the same time. They had these parallel paths. Both started in journalism. Rose traveled and wrote national stories, but Laura became a very successful regional writer, with a column in the Missouri Ruralist, which was a big agricultural newspaper. Rose was the better known literary figure at the time, but Laura became a respected columnist and editor.
Q.
I was surprised by some of the real world tragedies that were left out of the books, like the death of Laura’s baby brother, and by what remained, like Mary’s blindness. Whose vision do you think ultimately prevailed?
That’s clearly a unique and important aspect of Laura’s creative vision. Rose wanted to scrap the blindness entirely. She was also worried that readers would lose interest in an adolescent main character. She wanted to make Carrie the main character in the later books. Children’s literature was very different at the time. The young adult category didn’t exist. Writers dealing with older characters and more tragic and adult themes were blazing a new trail.
Laura understood her readers, and that a certain amount of tragedy would heighten their interest in her characters. She was willing to take on risk that other writers of the period were not.
Q.
Is that part of why we’re still so captivated by her books?
A.
I think we still read because the stories have such immediacy and such timeless appeal.
Laura’s voice is so remarkable. It brings the past to life, and illustrates the simplicity of childhood without sentiment. The books have a certain grittiness to them that’s remarkable for their time. They’re not too sweet, not too didactic. They let readers make their own decisions about what’s happening in her world.
Then, as children, we read her books and see adventure. As adults we see this entirely different layer underneath the words on the page. We read “The Long Winter,” and we see that the family was in real danger. That’s another reason why she endures. Her writing speaks to young readers and adults simultaneously. She has this unique and deceptively simple narrative voice that, as the fictional Laura ages, at once stays consistent and gets more mature.
You can see where the books sprang from her life, but the life itself was more multidimensional. She was more multidimensional. It’s somehow reassuring that she had this rich life to draw on for her fiction.
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Source:The Book That Became the “Little House” Books