Writing a Woman's Life Part 3

Rose Wilder Lane

Rose, about 1935

In Part One and Part Two of this series, I told you that, in 1993, I found William Holtz’s outstanding biography, A Ghost in the Little House. That book introduced me to the resources in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, where Roger MacBride, Rose’s literary executor, had deposited her work. McBride chose that site because Rose wrote the earliest (1919) biography of President Hoover.

When I visited that library the next year, I knew what I wanted: the diary Rose kept during the 1920s and 30s—a Line-A-Day five-year diary. Reading it closely, I could begin to see the amount of work she put into her mother’s books. But it was only after I transcribed all 83,000 words (!) into a searchable computer file that I could see what Rose’s life was really like at the Wilders’ farm during the difficult days of the Depression. She constantly worried about making enough money to support her household and that of her parents; about sandwiching her rewrites of Laura’s manuscript…