Rose Wilder Lane

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I remember as a little girl getting lost for days in the books in the Little House on the Prairie series.

You read those, I know. Yes, I did.

And I remember checking them out from the library, and the pages were already soft because so many people had checked it out, so many other kids.

And they were such big books, too. You remember that?

I felt like it was an accomplishment to read them all.

Right. They were hundreds of pages. And they depicted life in the Midwestern United States in the late 19th century. And they were the memories of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder. But what I didn’t realize until recently, Grant, was that those books were actually the product of a close collaboration between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose.

Rose Wilder Lane, is it?

I think so. Her mom stayed in the Midwest, but Rose became this world traveler and she lived in New York City for a while.

And there’s this whole correspondence between them where Rose was editing her mother’s work.

And a lot of the comments I found sort of heavy handed and overbearing and kind of arrogant sometimes.

She was known, Rose was known as a little bit of a bully, not just around her mother, but other people.

Right. There was one bit of advice that I saw in a letter that she wrote her mom that I thought really made a lot of sense.

She wrote,

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 of 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 which facts illustrate it.

What a perfect advice for a beginning writer, right?

And I could see this because I’ve read a number of manuscripts where people are writing their life story and they want me to look at it.

And for me to tell them what I think about their prospects is getting this published and making a sale.

Or even some of them think that they’re going to get a big movie deal and Spielberg will take it on.

And they make the same mistake, apparently, that Laura Ingalls Wilder made.

And Rose is right on target.

You can’t say, and on that day I was wearing this dress and these shoes, and I remember that the mail came.

You can’t list all that.

You have to summarize and bring together the important points into the narrative.

Yeah.

Are you tempted to go back and read The Little House on the Prairie books just to see what you think of it now,

Knowing what you know about the relationship between Rose and Laura and putting these books together?

You know, I did.

I mean, not the whole book, but I went back and read some of those, and they’re better than I remember.

Oh, wow.

And in fact, they are books that I would recommend to somebody who’s learning English as a second language.

I mean, there’s some very specific language to having to do with life on the prairie and all of that.

And very quotidian descriptions.

But I think it would be a really good book for somebody who’s just starting out in English.

Well, this is really interesting stuff.

We’ll share that letter that Rose wrote to her mother about putting the books together on our website at waywordradio.org.

If you’ve got a comment or a question about The Little House on the Prairie books

Or the writing process in general, we would love to hear about it.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.