The reality, unsurprisingly, was rather more vicious. Carefully, not to say exhaustively, annotated with research into the places they settled and the people they encountered, Pioneer Girl provides a fascinating counterpoint to Wilder’s sterilised chronicle of sunny life on the open prairie. Pioneer Girl offers more history and less fiction: it is presented as Wilder first wrote it, complete with asides to her daughter, no section breaks, and spelling mistakes (an ironic aspect for readers who remember the novels’ emphasis on Laura’s spelling bee triumphs). Eventually, Wilder would explain that her fictionalised chronicles were not “a history, but a true story founded on historical fact”. Gradually, Wilder’s artistic instincts and skill improved, and she took over more of the writing and editing, but Lane remained an important interlocutor for her mother’s developing sense of plot and character. When this proved impossible, she and Lane, a successful writer and experienced editor, began discussing the possibilities for adapting the story into children’s books that would follow the progress of young Laura from childhood to adulthood. With a dawning sense that her own experiences exemplified the US story of westward expansion, she set down her memories, from the age of three through to her marriage to Almanzo Wilder at 18, in hopes that her tale might find a publisher.

The 1929 crash had left her family in financial straits, and Wilder had been publishing a small domestic column in local magazines for some time. Wilder died in 1957 her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, published Wilder’s unfinished final novel, The First Four Years, in 1971, and three years later the immensely popular Little House on the Prairie series debuted on US TV.īut before all that was Pioneer Girl, a memoir that Wilder wrote for her daughter in 1930, and which has just been published for the first time. Six more books followed, detailing the family’s experiences on the frontier, creating an idealised, nostalgic account of Laura’s peripatetic early years, along with one book describing her husband Almanzo Wilder’s childhood on a farm in New York. Within a few years of her birth, the Ingalls family piled their few possessions into a covered wagon and started the trip into “Indian Territory”, to join the settlers pushing west in order to make manifest the destiny that America was determined to invent. L aura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods was first published in 1932, when its author was 65 it offers a sanitised tale of her childhood near Pepin, Wisconsin, just after the end of the US civil war.

Little house on the prairie books