I'll start with a pithy remark: If Rose Wilder Lane had been born in 1986 rather than 1886, I have no doubt she'd be touting herself as The Voice of MI'll start with a pithy remark: If Rose Wilder Lane had been born in 1986 rather than 1886, I have no doubt she'd be touting herself as The Voice of My Generation (whether true or imagined) and writing all sorts of very loosely autobiographical millennial fiction, probably with an accompanying podcast and Youtube channel, and a puzzling Instagram account filled in equal measure with photos of her uber-materialistic Living Her Best Life lifestyle with photos of her "humanitarian work" in Albania.
Now, onto the serious:
This is a very well-researched, well-written, poignant biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family. My mother discovered and fell in love with The Little House series when she was a kid in the 1960s, and she and I bonded over these books when I was a kid in the 1990s. As a kid, I generally took these books at face value and didn't appreciate the untold hardship and many omissions hidden behind the charming, generally upbeat stories of Laura and her family's adventures. As an adult, reading Caroline Fraser's book was very edifying. It definitely gave me a deep sense of appreciation for the broader cultural, historical, and economic circumstances into which Laura was born and grew up. Fraser acknowledges how modern readers have been upset at how Native Americans were treated by European settlers and subsequently depicted the Little House series, but explains that in Laura's time, this was normative and not the ethical dilemma we may feel today. Similarly, I appreciated Fraser's acknowledgment of Laura and her family's imperfections -- including that Laura's beloved father Charles's grand ambitions and wanderlust often didn't match the reality of his abilities and so he struggled provide stable income for his family, that Laura's husband Almanzo mismanaged money, and that Laura's daughter Rose's journalistic practices were glaringly unscrupulous even by the standards of that time.
Laura's life story fascinates me. She didn't have an easy childhood despite how charming she makes those years seem in her books. Life was unpredictable and dangerous on so many levels in the prairies of the mid- to late-1800s. Laura married young and seemingly well, which is where her books leave off, but her adult life was marked by even more hardship and struggles than I had realized. Fraser excels at portraying the extremely complicated relationship between Laura and her daughter Rose. Laura was born in 1867, and Rose only 19 years later in 1886, yet their life trajectories were so vastly different. Laura had an expansive pioneer spirit but largely conformed to the traditional gender roles of the time, ending her education and teaching career upon her marriage at 18, and largely dedicating herself to working in the home to support her husband and family until her turn as an author in later years. Rose seemed to largely buck traditional gender roles, divorcing the man she casually married after a few years, and spending most of her life traveling the world and working as a journalist and writer. Rose is also a troubling, at times unlikeable character in many ways; it's strongly implied that she suffered from mental illness which likely contributed to her erratic choices in an era where the effective treatment options for mental illness were practically nonexistent. The mother-daughter relationship was tumultuous and at times parasitic (on both sides), but importantly also served as the forging ground for the Little House series that has inspired so many. ...more
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