Writing a Woman's Life Part 2
Rose Wilder Lane
In the first post in this series, I wrote about why I chose to begin doing research into the life of Rose Wilder Lane. Here’s Part 2.
When I first learned about Rose, back in the early 1970s, I had no idea that, years later, I would write a novel about her—I was simply curious about her. I had discovered from the introduction of The First Four Years that Laura Ingalls Wilder had a daughter, Rose, and that—even though her writing career had long been overshadowed by her mother’s— Rose was remembered at least by some as a “famous author” who traveled abroad and wrote a “number of fascinating books.”
This intrigued me, and I began to collect Rose’s writings, discovering that she was an accomplished and impressive professional writer with a long string of newspaper stories, feature pieces, travel articles, books, and magazine fiction to her credit. I also compiled a timeline of Rose’s life, beginning with her birth in 1888 on the Wilders’ claim in Dakota Territory, through the family’s move to Mansfield MO, and Rose’s early career as a telegrapher for Western Union, her days as a San Francisco Bulletin feature writer, and her travels across Europe. Her newspaper journalism, I saw, was typical of the era: long on sensation and with a tenuous allegiance to the facts. She was a prolific writer, and her bibliography from those days is massive. Her books of that time--biographies of Jack London, Henry Ford, and Herbert Hoover--demonstrated her ability to create an appealing story. She was clearly skilled in turning lives into engaging fiction, a craft she would hone with her mother's work in the 1930s and 40s. The more I read, the more convinced I was that Rose was involved, somehow, in the writing of the Little House books.
This part of the project got a boost around 1978 when I found a privately published booklet by William T. Anderson, “Laura’s Rose.” The booklet provided some details I hadn’t yet discovered (like her walking tour of the Loire Valley in 1921), and a few more titles. I visited the Wilder farm and dug up some of the articles Laura wrote for the Missouri Ruralist, which made me even more sure that she could not have been the author—not the sole author, anyway—of the Little House books. Meanwhile, a couple of scholars had written articles that also questioned the idea that Laura was the sole author of my favorite children’s books, so I wasn't alone in my suspicions. They couldn't get much traction, though: the story of Laura, the farm-wife-turned-famous-author, was the dominant narrative.
And then in 1992, I learned that William Holtz, at the University of Missouri, was about to publish a biography of Rose titled The Ghost in the Little House. I found myself saying an emphatic yes, yes! to his well-documented arguments that Rose was the ghostwriter behind the books that were published under her mother’s name. Even more importantly, Holtz had done what every good biographer does: he had laid down a research trail. The notes and bibliography at the end of his book took me to the original sources he consulted: Rose’s letters, diaries, journals, and manuscripts, held in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.
And that, of course, was where I had to go next, in my efforts to learn who really wrote those wonderful books—the subject of the novel that became A Wilder Rose. I’ll be writing about that part of my adventure in Part 3 of this series, Writing a Woman’s Life.
Reading note: You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole lifetime spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just any ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts to illustrate it.― Rose Wilder Lane
Your Turn: Do you think Rose might have said “you tell a truth by selecting the facts to illuminate it”? How many “liberties” can a writer take with a story about somebody’s life before it becomes “fiction”? How many fictions live in a person’s life?
How to separate fiction from fact? That’s a profound question.
I imagine the more an individual about whom you are writing has written about themselves plus the facts (the who, what, when, where and how) of their lives can certainly demonstrate patterns of behavior. However, each biographer could interpret those patterns in a variety of ways. Thus we have biographies by different authors who reach quite different “takes” on the subject’s life. As we all write we filter the facts through the lens of our own lived experience and add that bias to the mix. I would imagine one can never be totally objective but simply strive for the best rendering based on the information at hand. Citing sources helps the reader understand from where some of the author’s conclusions have sprung. I imagine if a biographer describes a bit of where or how she came to the conclusion that the subject thought or felt a certain way would allow the reader some latitude to decide if that makes sense to them or not.
In a way all writing has to be fiction and all writing has to be fact at the same time.