Pioneer girl

American author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of beloved children’s books are still as nostalgic and riveting as ever, writes

from 1869 to 1883.

My sisters and I frequently re-enacted scenes from her books (we fought constantly to play ‘Laura’), pretending our bed was a covered wagon, and favouring country-styled dresses with floral motifs — because we imagined those were what Laura and her sisters Mary, Carrie and Grace would wear. And then came the 1970s television show

starring Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls that further opened the protagonist’s enchanting world to our wide-eyed imagination.

Wilder’s series of nine books, beginning from her early childhood right up to the early years of her marriage to Almanzo, chronicles the life of the pioneer girl who survived wildfires, tornadoes, malaria, blizzards and nearstarvation on the Great Plains in the late 1800s.

What makes her books so enduringly popular are her cast of unforgettable characters — Laura, her twinkly blue-eyed fiddler-playing Pa, her loving and resourceful Ma, her brave but blind eldest sister Mary, along with her sweet younger sisters and her experience of a happy and safe home life despite the hardship, isolation, wolves, bears and other travails that assailed this family of homesteading pioneers.

In the tradition of Jo March of

by Louisa M. Alcott and Dorothy of Wilder successfully created a brave child heroine who became a beloved ideal of children