Wilder and Lane Revisited

Abstract

Each of us who has studied the Little House books has chosen to tell one particular story about them, and not another, hooked as we are by different aspects of (these) books. Anita Clair Fellman's statement in Little House, Long Shadow (82) not only encapsulates these two major monographs (published six months apart by University of Missouri Press), but also the larger field of Ingalls-Wilder-Lane studies to which they contribute so much. To date, this field includes biographies for adults and children, book-length studies from feminist, historical, and material cultures perspectives, and numerous journal articles, as well as endless volumes of rediscovered writings and spinoffs, the most recent of which extend the Little House narrative through alternate viewpoints, such as Heather Williams's Nellie Oleson Meets Laura Ingalls (2007) and Elizabeth Kimmel Willard's Mary Ingalls on Her Own (2008). Although academic scholarship has only gradually embraced the popu- lar books attributed to Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), these two studies by Fellman and by John E. Miller are the latest benchmarks of what has become a respectable and established field. As Miller notes, any Little House scholar must now acknowledge the contributions of Wilder's daughter, the undervalued modernist/regionalist writer Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), who researched, edited, pruned, rewrote, and typed her mother's manuscripts while frequently acting as media- tor between Wilder and agents, editors, and readers. What these two books also establish is that future scholarship in the field will need to take into account the persuasive arguments made in these two mono- graphs about the political undertones throughout Wilder's autofiction and life writing. While there is some overlap between the two studies, each scholar uses a specific paratextual source as a framework for analysis: in Fell - man's case, Wilder's still unpublished first-person memoir, Pioneer Girl, which she then expanded into eight novels published between