Return to the Little House
This year marks 150th anniversary of the birth of author Laura Ingalls Wilder
When I think of the books I read as a child, an emotion always accompanies the recollection. With The Little House on the Prairie series, the feeling I remember is one of anticipation, not just of plucking the next book out of my box set, but of the way the novels made the world seem enormous, my role in it important. And Laura Ingalls — with her scrappy attitude, her fascination with building, butchering and bullet moulding, her refusal to wear a bonnet, freckles be damned — was the heroine of my youth. I didn’t need to be told, often disingenuously, that girls could do anything. I had Laura to show me what was possible.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books — all of them based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family in the Midwest. The flurry of celebrations that have commemorated the occasion since February (you can find a listing at littlehouseontheprairie.com) combined with the publication of several related books, are a testament to the lasting impression Ingalls Wilder’s writing has left on millions.
Among these tributes is the new novel “Caroline: Little House, Revisited,” by historical fiction and non-fiction author Sarah Miller. As a child, I didn’t consider how important Ma Ingalls was to the Little House story. That’s because I was a typical kid, far more mesmerized by Laura’s easier relationship with her Pa, who got most of the glory. Admittedly, Pa was pretty cool. Because of him I could probably butcher a pig, then cure it in a smoker I had built myself by cutting down a tree on my property, and survive an entire winter on the meat. But a few years ago, when New York Times food writer Pete Wells wrote that modern day Brooklyn, with its plentiful classes on pickling vegetables, canning foods, raising chickens and fermenting kimchee, is starting to resemble 19th-century De Smet, I laughed at the pretentious absurdity of it all — but I also thought of Ma and the importance of her domestic work to her family’s survival. Perhaps people can’t be entirely blamed for attempting to evoke a time when homemaking was an actual matter of life and death, instead of just feeling that way. (It certainly makes the idea of cooking dinner more exciting.)
Regardless of the magnitude of the work she did, Ma always seemed to fade into the background in both the Little House novels and the spinoff television show. (Thanks a lot, Michael Landon.) Here, she finally gets her due. In Miller’s novel, what Caroline gave up when she travelled to the wilds of Kansas with her family becomes clear. She may have seemed distant and strict, but she was really pregnant, scared and homesick. It’s not a fast-paced novel, but nor were the original Little House books. It’s reassuring and emotionally detailed, and fans of the original series will find this book as comforting as canning summer peaches.
“The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes That Inspired the Little House Books” by Marta McDowell is just out, but an advance copy brought me such joy to read in small increments over the course of this summer. Ingalls Wilder connected profoundly with the natural world, and McDowell easily unites the reader with this awe. This book is a visual treasure trove: there are illustrations from the Little House books, each one bringing with it a wave of nostalgia, photographs of Ingalls Wilder and her family, maps, horticultural drawings and more. It’s also useful in a practical sense: I have a black walnut tree in my yard, and when I idly wondered one afternoon if I could extract the meat from the walnuts I remembered Laura and Mary collecting in the novels, I flipped through and found detailed instructions on doing just that. Plus, there was a final, rather delightful addendum. “I gave up. Two weeks later, a high-priced bag of shelled black walnuts from a Midwest supplier arrived in the mailbox.” I suppose we could all be domestic pioneers — but in 2017, can’t we find better uses for our time?
Avid Little House fans, or those looking to learn more about some of the intrigue surrounding the work of Ingalls Wilder (including her daughter’s muchhyped involvement in her writing), will be enlightened and entertained by “Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Why, asks editor Nancy Tystad Koupal, did these books resonate with so many people in so many countries? This is a question the book answers well, through writing by various authors and scholars.
Many critics had trouble understanding why a little girl’s experiences during such a formative period in American history would matter to anyone, but I’ve never questioned it, nor was I surprised when my children enthusiastically devoured the Little House books, even when other tomes from my childhood were a hard sell. Both Lauras strode bravely and innocently into a world where every single action, right or wrong, had a greater purpose. And Ingalls Wilder wrote about that life in a frank and headlong way that young readers will likely find impossible to resist for many generations to come.