Good timing. I didn’t read the Little House books as a kid, but I read them to my kids several times when they were young, and we’ve visited some of the sites, too. This summer I got to thinking about them again. I needed a bicycling destination in southern Minnesota, and picked the Plum Creek site, which Myra and I visited for the first time.
So it was fun to find this good article at the New Yorker by Judith Thurman about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose. It seems there was also a chat session with the author at which readers could ask questions. It was there that I found a good summary of the complicated relationship between the two women in writing the Little House books:
QUESTION FROM GUEST: Were you able to see whether or not Laura learned from Rose’s edits?
JUDITH THURMAN: Great question. That would require a really close study of the manuscripts and the correspondence. And even then it might not be conclusive. “The First Four Years” suggests Laura could not write anywhere near as well on her own as she did with Rose. And, in fact, I think they needed each other, the odd chemistry of their closeness and distance and past, to transcend the limitations they both had.
And the article itself explains how Rose wasn’t able to write anything as well on her own without her mother’s material, either.
I wonder if Thurman isn’t a little too hard on “The First Four Years.” I did not read that one to my kids, btw — didn’t even discover it until we had read the others a couple of times. Here’s what Thurman says.
At some point soon afterward, Laura did set down the story of her experience as a bride and a young mother, but she abandoned it. That was the manuscript that was found after her death; in 1971 MacBride published it, without revisions, as “The First Four Years,” and it is now marketed as volume nine in the Little House series. But Laura’s instincts were right. The writing is prissy and amateurish; the heroine is bigoted and obsessed with money. It is too simplistic for an adult reader, and too mature for a child. In slightly more than a hundred pages, there isn’t even a glimmer of the radiant simplicity that draws one to the Little House books.
The first time I read that book I almost couldn’t stand to do it. The difficulties and unrelieved disappointments Laura and her husband faced made were too painful, especially after the wonderful childhood and adolescence. There are difficulties and disappointment in the regular Little House books, too, but they are overcome. Not so in The First Four Years, it seemed.
Yet, when I went back to read it quite a few years later, it was much easier going. Maybe we had been through a few more difficulties ourselves by then; in any case, it was a lot easier to accept and appreciate how life ended up for Laura.
I’ve often wondered if anyone else has had the same differing reactions to that particular book at different stages of his/her own life.