The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

hard years were finally over, and the couple had been living in relative security, if not full financial bloom, for years. Rose was a successful writer who traveled the world; even Laura wrote regularly as a columnist on poultry farming and rural life for the Missouri Ruralist.

It wasn’t until the onset of the increasingly dire circumstances of the Great Depression that Laura really began thinking about simpler times. There was something familiar about this new era of poverty and uncertainty, something that resonated with the Ingallses’ own roving years. Laura’s family had never had much, but they had always managed to eke out a slight living and stay together. This courage and tenacity seemed especially suited to Depression-era life, with its privations and pressing needs. It had been years since Laura saw such widespread unemployment, hunger, and want. Now, combined with her mother’s death, these reduced circumstances made her look backward to the experiences of her pioneer childhood. Laura, who was in her early sixties, began to write a memoir she called Pioneer Girl, a first-person manuscript detailing her family’s westward journey. In 1930, she showed the book to her journalist daughter for her opinion, and before she knew it, Laura was adapting passages for a children’s book tentatively titled When Grandma Was a Little Girl.

It can be easy to confuse the real Laura with the Laura of her books, to mistake the Little House on the Prairie series for a sweet tale of churning butter and stomping on hay. At the time of their publication, nobody had ever really undertaken what Laura achieved with such success: a series of books aimed at children that re-created a historical period in such vivid and compelling detail. Succeed she did, but not by telling life exactly as it was. In fact, the books were written over thirteen contentious, uneasy years marked by a decidedly complex relationship with her grown daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Though Rose’s role in the creation of the Little House books has gained acknowledgment in recent years, many Laura fans have no idea of the degree to which she influenced both the form and success of her mother’s—fictitious—life story.

Throughout the process of crafting the book, Laura drew upon her daughter for editorial and moral support. By this time, Rose was a restless, resentful woman still full of memories of the poverty and restriction of childhood and frustrated by what she saw as her mother’s lack of literary sophistication. Family ties didn’t turn Rose into a permissive editor; in fact, the editorial letters that survive are brutal, reflecting a lack of sympathy for her mother’s literary talent guaranteed to leave an acidic taste in fans’ mouths. Rose felt compelled to force the work into the literary image of the day; Laura struggled to live up to her daughter’s high standards. Mother and daughter both fought to get their version on the page, collaborating and clashing as they gave simultaneous birth to one of literature’s great coups.

Unbeknownst to Laura, Rose was committing a sort of literary heresy even as she helped her mother craft her first novel for children. Little House in the Big Woods appeared in 1931 to acclaim and good reviews, and Rose’s novel Let the Hurricane Roar appeared in 1932. An adult novel following the adventures of a couple named Caroline and Charles as they confront the American West (sound familiar?), the book became a best seller. Though some have suggested that the book was another collaboration between Laura and Rose, more recent works have hinted that Laura had no idea Rose was plundering, even plagiarizing, her unpublished memoir for her own gain. However she felt personally about the book, which was a Depression-era success story in itself, Laura remained silent. We’ll never know her true feelings on Rose’s betrayal, only that she set them aside in favor of her increasing compulsion to continue her life story. She turned her attention to the next book in the series, then the next, creating and re-creating her frontier childhood for a popular audience.

My favorite Little House book has always been The Long Winter, which fictionalizes the Ingallses’ struggle during the Snow Winter of 1880-81. It’s not a cheerful book per se, but you wouldn’t be cheerful if you had lived through that winter, either. Plagued by blizzards and cut off from the railroads for a solid five months by blinding snow and perpetual storms, the residents of De Smet, South Dakota, survived temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero. The tiny prairie town depended on the railroads for supplies and dry goods; both were stuck behind snow drifts for months on end, until the town’s residents were forced to eat their seed wheat or starve.

Laura’s fictional account of the winter that almost killed her family is deceptively simple. Though the Ingalls family actually had a young married couple with a baby on the way living with them at the time, Laura chose to write about the family as if they’d survived the winter alone and in utter isolation. Her story of survival and basic instinct takes simplicity to a new extreme. With no firewood and no way of going out for supplies, the family must burn straw they twist into little sticks in their stove for warmth. There’s no school, no social activity of any kind, just the monotony of survival. Laura and her sisters crowd around the kitchen table and recite their lessons by day; at night, they sing songs and tell stories for entertainment. With nothing but axle grease for lamp oil, they create a makeshift lamp out of a button and some fabric. When they’re not studying or entertaining one another, they bend over a coffee mill, grinding seed wheat into flour for the coarse brown bread that sustains them for months.

Even given the nightmarish circumstances it depicts, there’s a humanity and a sense of dignity in the pages of The Long Winter that made quite an impression on a little girl who had never seen snow. Stripped of any outside landscape and denied the few comforts to which they have become accustomed, the Ingalls family gets down to basics, and the simple task of living takes up most of their time. Their struggle against the elements is one of waiting, but also one of angry confrontation. Though their relationships with one another are severely restrained by the mores and expectations of 1880s ladies and gentlemen, each member of the Ingalls family loses their patience at some point. Even gentle Ma almost breaks under the knowledge that the train will not come until the blizzards stop.

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.