Writing a Woman's Life Part 1

Rose Wilder Lane

Rose, about 1905

Ever since I wrote Writing From Life: Telling the Soul’s Story,  I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the importance, for women, of writing our own stories: documenting our lives, our passions, our hopes, our achievements. I’ve done my share of this personal work. Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place is my story about twenty-plus years of life in the Texas Hill Country. And An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days is the journal of one year of my life—2008, which turned out to be an astonishing year in the life of our country.

Writing women’s lives is a fascinating project, for our experiences are rich in unexpected secrets, unexplored depths, and unrecognized achievements. I spent nearly two decades researching the life of a particular woman, and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about this process, illustrated by what I’ve learned about her.

She was Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), the daughter and only of Laura and Almanzo Wilder—little known now, famous in her day. She was born in Dakota Territory, grew up in Mansfield MO, and left home at 18 to become first a telegrapher, then a reporter and feature writer, a freelance journalist, a world traveler, a magazine fiction writer, a best-selling novelist, and a political philosopher.

I was compelled to learn more about Rose because, growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, I loved the eight Little House books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I remember reading them aloud to myself, perched in the catalpa tree outside my bedroom window, loving the sound of the words, the flow of the sentences, the craft of the story, so simple and yet so real and compelling. I understood that they were the work of an elderly lady who lived on a Missouri farm and wrote these true stories about her childhood by the light of a kerosene lamp. One of my teachers called Mrs. Wilder an “untaught literary genius.” I had to agree. And since I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I was heartened to discover that someone who hadn’t graduated high school and who had lived all her life on a farm could simply pick up her pen and write eight wonderful books—and get them published. Eight of them! I vowed to grow up and write just the way Mrs. Wilder did.

And then I had a great shock. By then, it was the early 1970s, and I was a grad student in literature. I picked up what the publisher called the “ninth Little House book,” The First Four Years, the story of Laura’s and Almanzo’s early years on their South Dakota homestead. But what an enormous disappointment! This couldn’t be Laura’s work. The writing was stiff and awkward, the narrative clumsy, the characters unbelievable. This must have been written, I thought, by somebody else, using Laura’s name. I was bewildered, disconcerted, dismayed. What was going on here?

Luckily, there was a brief introduction to the book, and I started there. I learned that, after Laura’s death, the manuscript of The First Four Years was given by Rose Wilder Lane to Roger Lea MacBride, her lawyer and literary agent. Rose—yes, I knew about Rose, Laura’s only child. But the introduction told me things about her that I didn’t know: that she had lived in Europe, that she was the bestselling author of books and magazine articles, and that she had gone to Vietnam as a war correspondent at the age of 78. She seemed to be quite a remarkable woman.

And then something occurred to me. What if Rose had written The First Four Years? What if the publisher had put Laura’s name on the book so it would sell better? That would account for the differences, wouldn’t it?

But the introduction declared that the manuscript was in Laura’s handwriting, so that couldn’t be the answer. And when I finally managed to find a copy of The Peaks of Shala, Rose’s 1923 book about her travels in Albania, I could see that Laura’s daughter was a highly skilled storyteller with a remarkable eye for description and a strong narrative line. The Peaks of Shala, in its own way, was every bit as accomplished as the Little House books.

And that discovery led me to consider another, even more startling possibility. What if Rose had secretly written—or at least worked extensively on—her mother’s stories, turning them into the Little House books and transforming her mother into a famous author. What if Laura indeed had written The First Four Years but without Rose’s help?

It was those two huge what ifs that pulled me into the research—a long, long learning trail, both in distance and time—that led to the writing of the biographical novel, A Wilder Rose. I’ll tell you about that research in Part 2 of this series, under the BookScapes tab.

Reading note. This brief sample will give you a sense of Rose’s lyrical writing style. It comes from her letter to Clarence Day (the author of Life With Father), June 10, 1926, about a moment on a remote mountain in Albania after WWI.

It was like being quite alone on the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over … I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in dust across interminable plains. All the clamor and clatter, confusion of voices, tumults, and conflicts, must still be going on, down there—over the edge, and below—but here there was only the sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself.

Your Turn. Are you a fan of the Little House books? Have you read The First Four Years? How did you feel about it? Does it bother you to think that somebody else might have been involved in writing your favorite childhood books?