Dear Rose,
I like you. In many ways, I think you’re fabulous. You’re so much fun to be around—a tremendous storyteller, always good for a joke (and not always a clean one!). I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone with such a delightful combination of worldliness and down-home simplicity. And I’m so impressed with everything you’ve accomplished in your life … your writings, your travels, your caretaking (though the Turner boys …well, all’s well that ends well I suppose), and most importantly your maintenance of spirit. People only think they have convictions until they meet Rose Wilder Lane.
But that book? On the Way Home? Published after your mother’s death? I have only one question.
What were you thinking?
Don’t misunderstand me. I think it was lovely that you decided to publish this very early writing of your mother’s. What a wonderful piece of history to have, a record of her family’s final move, the journey across the Midwest to the place they’d live the rest of their lives. And yes, it was thoughtful of you to bookend the journal with settings beginning in De Smet and ending in Mansfield.
But I repeat: what were you thinking?
Really, the beginning is all right, though it gives me a strange feeling to read your reaction to your mother’s attempt at brightening a dreary situation when she said living in the big house in De Smet was like camping. She was just a mother trying to make sure her daughter didn’t worry, wasn’t she? Not to mention the way you talked about her and your father’s diff-theer-i-a. Not that your phrasing wouldn’t fit in perfectly in a piece of fiction. Your observations were always so severely pointed. But it was the wrong place, I think.
Still, neither of those issues is so important in the grand scheme.
I’m really talking about the ending. Rose, I don’t get it. You spend more than half the amount of pages as your mother’s entire record on your epilogue. This is useful, of course—how nice to have your mother’s story put in context. And some of it I dearly love. Such a way with words you have. Your description of your mother’s preparation to head to the bank to sign the papers buying the piece of land she and your father finally found in Mansfield is exquisite, and so exciting to a Little House reader: putting on her black wedding dress, brushing and plaiting her beautiful long hair that extended to her heels, fluffing her bangs, whistling “Oh Susanna,” perching her black sailor hat atop her head.
But putting things in context isn’t all you do. Essentially, you use these pages to tell your own stories.
The first story is about your parents’ missing $100 bill. It’s all the money they have in the world, and they were going to use it as a deposit on the land they found. And it’s misplaced. Your parents are understandably upset. This is what you write:
Suddenly [Laura] thought, hoped, asked, Had I taken it myself, to play with?
NO! I felt scalded. She asked, Was I sure? I hadn’t just opened the desk sometime, for fun? My throat swelled shut; I shook my head, no. “Don’t cry,” she said automatically. I wouldn’t cry, I never cried, I was angry, insulted, miserable, I was not a baby who’d play with money or open that desk for fun, I was going on eight years old. I was little, alone, and scared. My father and mother sat there, still. In the long stillness I sank slowly into nothing but terror, pure terror without cause or object, a nightmare terror.
I’m not saying what you wrote isn’t true. You were there; you know what happened. (Or at least you know what you remember.) You just seemed to make some interesting choices. I can’t quite figure out why you said what you did—and left out what you left out.
Later on, you detail how your father cuts a slab of salt pork to give to a needy man with a hungry family, and you quote your mother crying out at the gesture: “Manly, no! We’ve got Rose.” “He paid no attention,” you write.
While the reader is still left wondering why you included this information about your father, making us think, well, not very highly of him, you move on. Even though the money is thankfully found and the land purchased, your family is still destitute so your father tries to sell some lumber he has cut. He comes home, finally, very late on the day he went out to sell it. He’s exhausted, and you meet him at the wagon and find out he sold it. You run in to tell your mother (whom you say “snaps” at you that of course she’s glad! when you ask her, isn’t she glad?) and then run out again to your father.
I pranced out, to tell my father how glad she was. And he said, with a sound of crying in his voice, “Oh, why did you tell her? I wanted to surprise her.”
You say such things, little things, horrible, cruel, without thinking, not meaning to. You have done it; nothing can undo it. This is a thing you can never forget.
Rose. Why? Why on earth would you include such words about your parents who have passed away? Why do you have the desire to tarnish them both in print through the eyes of a seven-year-old? Particularly your mother, who is loved and cherished the world over as the little girl who grew up on the prairie. Are you really that bitter in your 70s? About something that happened over half a century ago?
And why do it in her book? It’s almost like you were capitalizing on the wide audience of Little House readers to present your mother not as Laura, but as the person you saw and wanted everyone else to see, the person you didn’t always agree with, who wasn’t always “Laura Ingalls,” the Little House character. But in what was essentially a companion Little House book, all I was left with was an overwhelming sense of disrespect.
I can’t help but wonder: What good did writing that do you? Moreover, what good did publishing it do? It seems to me you had a chip on your shoulder that you could never quite get rid of. Your portrayal of your parents feels like … well, it feels like payback.
Payback for what, I couldn’t say.
But you do write so well, Rose. In a manner completely different from your mother. You truly were one of the country’s great writers of the 20th century. No one can ever take that away from you, not even the angelic legacy of your mother.
Sincerely,
A fan, reader, and friend
I always loved her description of her mother getting ready to go sign the papers on the land.
I just could never figure out why she sounded so cold sometimes when talking about her parents. Reading this was my very first introduction to an adult Rose. I guess, like everyone else, what she wrote always left me wondering. I wished she would have written more about what happened in the years that followed.
I just got out my copy of On The Way Home. I remember saving for it. It’s a hardcover and I paid $4.95 for it.
I’m glad you wrote this, Sandra. It’s great “food for thought.” Rose’s epilogue to On The Way Home has always left a bad taste in my mouth, and you do a good job of putting words to this.
She was crazy.
Thank you Sandra for presenting OTWH this way. I never thought about it in this light.
No, I don’t think Rose was crazy but I do think she suffered from depression perhaps bordering on bipolar. And, she was resentful of her mother’s fame with her “juveniles” while her fame as a serious writer was fading.
Rose loved her parents but she resented them at the same time and that carried through in her writing career. She basically stole a few stories from her mother but wasn’t nearly as sucessful with them.
This letter was exquisite.
I’ve never thought about Rose’s stories before, how she presented them, and why… perhaps because in reading them, I never came away with negative feelings about Laura or Almanzo, only Rose.
But you make some excellent points. I never really thought about the fact that Rose was writing this as an elderly woman reflecting on her parents, who have already passed away. That really puts her in a bad light. It’s one thing to recognize that the child Rose was highly sensitive and the least little thing seemed to offend her greatly — but she’s had decades to grow up and get over it. But apparently she hasn’t.
Or has she? Is it that Rose is seizing this opportunity to seek vengeance for whatever wrongs she feels her parents have committed against her, now that they’re no longer around to defend themselves? Or is it merely that Rose, ever the writer, found it impossible to simply relate the events of a story, and leave it at that? As a fiction writer, she knows the power of engaging the reader’s emotions. Is she merely including — perhaps even exaggerating — her overly sensitive feelings in these anecdotes to make a good story better, without thought for how she might tarnish her parents’ memory in so doing?
It really could go either way, or perhaps a bit of both. I suppose we’ll never know.
If Rose was trying to make her parents look bad in On the Way Home, she didn’t succeed with me. If anything, she merely made them more human, but no less admirable.
I’ve always wondered that, while in Louisiana with EJ, whether some of her aunt’ disagreeable personality rubbed off on her and had a lasting effect on her.
I have to admit I was surprised and disappointed when I learned that she got involved with Ayn Rand and the Objectivist philosophy, as Objectivism can be a rather disagreeable phillosophy.
I’m guessing that if I’d gotten to know Rose during those years, I’d likely not have gotten along with her very well.
Dr. Laura: Everything you wrote is what I meant by my shorthand “crazy.” Bordering on bipolar? Indeed. Resentful, conflicted and in a lot of ways ret-conning reality to suit the evil-parents archetype she’d constructed for herself in her head? Yes.
I may have read too much “Ghost in the Little House,” but all she does is rag on LIW and then try to coerce her like a baby, and it’s all very tiring.
I’ve often wondered the very same thing…why would she write that way about her parents? I could never decide if Rose was just a complaining, petulant type of person, or if she really *meant* to portray her parents in a negative light. This was my first exposure to Rose’s writing, too, and I was a little bit shocked. Laura was one of my childhood idols; I hated to see her image tarnished.
After reading more of Rose’s writing, I began to wonder if it was just a form of jealousy. Certainly, Rose had been a well-known author–but Laura’s success was ultimately far greater. I know there are claims that Rose actually ghostwrote the LH books, but I can’t see it. Rose’s characters were never “alive” the way Laura’s were. Somehow, the combination of Laura’s writing and Rose’s editing created a new whole that was greater than the sum of the two parts. I’ve felt that maybe Rose resented this, and painted her parents in an unflattering light to soothe her pride.
What was Rose thinking? She was thinking very well indeed, I’d say, to share On the Way Home with the world, and to frame it with some of her own memories. We have the polite convention of writing kindly and sweetly about our parents, especially after they are gone, but Rose was nothing if not unconventional. She was also a born writer of the kind that filters experience and observations through her own feelings intensely: a journalist, a diarist, a memoirist. She had a talent for sketching incidents so they are vivid and indelible. Her storytelling ability made the moments she wrote about unforgettable – who can ever forget her story of little Rose watching while the house burned down, of riding Spookendyke, of telling poor Ma how she wished she could be the Wandering Jew so she could curse Jesus! That’s who Rose was, and that’s what she did: it was natural to her to try to bring scenes alive, rather than to write sentimentally about dear old mom and dad.
I never got a bad feeling about Laura and Almanzo from reading On the Way Home. Quite the opposite. Rose just made them come more alive to me, in all the remembered little details. Laura whistling, her sigh when Ma told her Rose had not been very good, her snappishness. It all makes her a much more real person than sugar-coating her or “only remembering the good.” It’s odd, isn’t it, that I disagree with you about virtually *all* of the things that you single out as offensive! But I do. What’s wrong with her writing it as “diff-ther-ia” – she was doing her Rose fictionalizing thing, remembering her emotion as a child. The feeling “scalded” when asked about the $100 bill – what on earth’s wrong with that? Again, it brings emotional intensity to the scene, it shows how feelings were running rampant through the family at that terrible moment. It doesn’t put Laura in a bad light. It doesn’t mean Rose is completely solipsistic telling it from her own point of view. Her point of view as a child *is* extremely valuable! She was one of the three family members. She shows the family dynamic. She conveys the feelings. There’s just nothing wrong with any of this. And if she hadn’t created a vivid setting around the very drab journal, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting. I’m sure she felt she had to brighten it up.
And again, how different is my response to yours! When Almanzo gives the salt pork to the needy man and Laura cries out, it doesn’t make me think “not that highly” of Almanzo, as it does you. I admire him for it! He’s thinking of the poor family’s terrible need, and standing up to Laura for what he believes is right. He’s the one doing the right thing; Laura is having a moment of weakness, though a very understandable and human one. The incident certainly does not put either of them in remotely a “bad” light – again, I just can’t undersand why you object to it. Similarly, how in the world is relating how Rose told the good news before Almanzo had a chance, “tarnishing” her parents? I can’t agree at all. She is telling a poignant moment and reflecting how things, once done, can’t be changed. It’s very much like the scene in The Long Winter when Laura asks Pa to play the fiddle and he can’t, and she painfully wishes she hadn’t asked – but it’s too late.
In sum, I don’t see this book as even remotely disrespectful. She’s trying to bring her parents to life as she saw and knew them, for us to see them she remembered them, as real honest to goodness people with moments of weakness: that’s a wonderful way to make history come alive! I won’t argue that Rose had a chip on her shoulder, and neuroses up the kazoo; she was emotionally unsteady as well as feisty, but in spite of all this, I don’t think she was “settling scores” here. I think the portrait of her young and struggling parents she gives us is enormously tender. She shows them as courageous and gallant. One clue as to why your point of view may be at such extreme variance with mine, is in your use of the word “angelic” to describe Laura. We all love Laura. But angelic? I would simply hate to think of her that way! I read the books again and again to try to discover what she was really like and what it was like to live in her world, historically – not to sentimentalize or idealize her. We expect people to speak reverentially of their dead parents but that would not have produced this vital portrayal of them, and Rose, the writer, knew it. She brought the skills she’d learned writing biography, to use here, and I for one am glad she did.
I guess the question here is whether Rose ought to have written a prologue and epilogue that was closer the tone of the Little House series, or whether it was appropriate to contribute her own bit of unvarnished memoir instead.
I wouldn’t say either one is more “right” than the other, but I think a lot of it depends on context. Like the Little House books, On the Way Home was published by Harper & Brothers. But was it positioned as a children’s book? I’m curious as to what Harper’s and Rose’s expectations were regarding OTWH (or if they were even of the same mind about it).
I don’t know if I would’ve found Rose’s bitterness so weird and bewildering in those passages if I’d come across them in a different kind of book, one that wasn’t frequently listed in the front of my Little House books as part of the series. If Rose had any idea at all that the book would be read that way, then yes, it does seem a little disrespectful. But there’s no way to know for sure, I’m not sure if I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, but ultimately I appreciate what she contributed in those pages.
It’s also really interesting that she wrote this extremely blunt and candid bit of prose while at the same time vehemently insisting that Laura didn’t fictionalize anything. I can’t help wonder if after years of defending “the truth” of the Little House books, Rose simply refused to see that the way she’d written HER true account was different from the way the LH books were written.
Or maybe this was her passive-aggressive way of telling the world that the Little House truth wasn’t the only truth.
Also (and I’m so glad you brought this all up in such a great entry that is making us all think), another thing we can take away from Rose’s writing in OTWH is this: For all she contributed to the Little House books, for everything she did to make them great, she SO was not a good children’s writer. She can call up childhood impressions vividly but can’t recount them without infusing them with a whole lifetime of resentment. That much is clear!
Diana mentioned Rose needing to create a vivid setting around a drab journal — I was actually thinking on this earlier today and am wondering if there’s any chance that Rose wrote as she did, again not to malign her parents, but to show off her writing talents, to showcase them to Little House fans, side by side with her mother’s writing. To leave the world a clue.
I was thinking to myself, why publish On the Way Home at all? It was just a journal. It wasn’t anything spectacular. Rose could easily have used the journal as her own guide to recreating that journey, and written up the entire trip in her own book to follow up the series for LH fans, and it likely would have made for a far better work overall. Why would Rose, who certainly didn’t need the money it would bring, publish her mother’s writing that she herself knew wasn’t great — and then both before and after it, throw all her powers of stirring up emotion in the reader into her own account of what happened? Could it be possible that despite hiding her own part in the creation of the Little House books until her death, she did it to leave the world a clue? “Look at our writing side by side — look at mine, then look at hers. Think about it.”
Again, no way of ever knowing for sure what she might have been thinking or what her purpose was, but it does make one wonder…
Hmmm, there’s a lot to think about here. I guess my first impression is to agree with Diana about a lot of the instances. I always had the impression of Rose writing this through a 7 year old’s eyes. For example, she didn’t realize until after she told her mother that her father was trying to surprise Laura. And that his comment was one of the first times, she realized his feelings could be hurt, like hers.
My next is the comment about publishing the basic journal. I can see Rose getting letter after letter after letter. And she just doesn’t seem to me to have been the type to enjoy sitting down for a couple of hours every day to answer school children. So one day she came across her mother’s journal. And she realizes that she could publish it and get out of answering the questions about how they ended up in Missouri every. day. She sits down at her type writer and it a week produces the intro and conclusion. She sends it off to Harper Collins as a “bit of junk” that they might like. They are thrilled to see another “Little House” book. After all, the series sells well and they didn’t think they’d get another book since the author had died. The book gets published so Harpers has a few more sales and Rose has one less question to answer.
Wendy says: < It’s also really interesting that she wrote this extremely blunt and candid bit of prose while at the same time vehemently insisting that Laura didn’t fictionalize anything.
It’s very interesting. In fact, I would have to say that one of the times I’ve found Rose the most deranged is when she says that! Who did she think she was kidding? Her own memories as she tells them are different from the stories, and the stories themselves are different from Laura’s early versions. Could it be she was such an embroiderist herself (joke here – she *was* a great needlewoman!) that she could hardly tell anymore, especially at the distance of time, what was true and what embroidered? Certainly she, like Laura, both saw the material of real life as subject matter frankly to be shaped into good stories. To convey the “feeling” of what the truth was, rather than the actual literal details. You don’t tell about the murderer, might be too rough for a kids’ book. You don’t tell about *all* the jobs young Laura had, you pick and choose and edit to create a certain picture. You skip the scene where little brother Freddie died. You advance Laura’s age here, throw out the bread from the Russian woman’s blouse in one version, give it to the other family in another version. You take three different girls and make one Nellie Oleson. You erase most of Almanzo’s brothers and sisters and make him younger. Well, we can all make our own examples. But “truth” for both Rose *and* Laura was…free material to shape.
What were their motives? Laura wanted to make a memorial to her father, tell the story of a changing America, write a book that would “last,” and that would make money. Rose wanted to help her mother achieve what she wanted, partly out of love but perhaps equally because it made her feel powerful and superior, that *she* was the authority, the magician weaving the puppet strings, masterfully teaching her mother “how to write.” She must have had mixed feelings of pride and of being taken aback when Laura’s writing evolved out of apprenticeship into mastership – and surpassed her own. It’s impossible she didn’t see the irony that it was her mother, not herself, who ended up writing the “great book.” Like any human being – not even a warped, passive-aggressive, bipolar, depressed one (or any of the labels we’ve been giving her, though we really don’t know her well enough to diagnose), she had mixed feelings, and certainly some feelings of jealousy. But she didn’t have *only* feelings of jealousy. On some level she deeply loved and respected her parents. She writes of them with affection and impatience – feelings so many people have about their elderly parents. So it’s a complicated issue, and hard to separate out all the different strands of Rose’s feelings, motives, conclusions. Whatever the mother/daughter emotions, the chemistry of Laura and Rose reacted against each other to create something wonderful. It sometimes happens that way with collaborators – there’s a piquant balance that comes from the combination of their very different qualities, yin and yang. Rose’s writing alone is good, very vigorous, but if it wasn’t for the Little House books, she would be utterly forgotten today. Laura’s writing alone? Not inspiring. Together? They’re more than the sum of their parts.
Rebecca says: < wondering if there’s any chance that Rose wrote as she did, again not to malign her parents, but to show off her writing talents, to showcase them to Little House fans, side by side with her mother’s writing. To leave the world a clue.
I love that! It *does* have the ring of the moment when Laura rewrote Ida’s verse, “to show what she could do,” doesn’t it? (Getting distracted again, but that’s something I’ve always wondered about. Why is Laura the guilty one about writing the lazy lousy Liza Jane song, when Ida wrote it in the first place and Laura only “did a Rose” on it? Why does Ida get to still be “truly good,” and why does Ida promise not to tell who wrote the verse – when she wrote it herself?)
< “Look at our writing side by side — look at mine, then look at hers. Think about it.”
Yep. Like you, I can’t say for sure that’s what Rose was thinking. But it does have that effect, and you have to think an effect, in the hands of a canny writer like Rose, is intended! Certainly Harpers wanted “more Laura.” For that matter, it’s odd The First Four Years wasn’t published in Rose’s lifetime. It’s said that she “didn’t have the heart” to publish it, and I can certainly see why, but I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of framework she could possibly have given THAT!
Wow – Sandra, this was very interesting to read, and I admire the thought that went into it. But I have to say that your conclusions and reactions from Rose’s writing are so incredibly different from mine that I am still trying to get my head around it. I am going to have to go back and read OTWH again and think about these things.
I agree with what Diana Birchall wrote, and would add that I would prefer that Laura and Almanzo be portrayed as human and fallible, like all of us, rather than sugarcoated and angelic. I don’t deny that Rose has “issues” – that is part of what makes Rose fascinating to me.
By disagreeing with your view of whether Rose had an ax to grind against her deceased parents (and whether OTWH is or is not an example of said ax-grinding), I hope I don’t sound disrespectful or argumentative. I am just rather taken aback that a text can be seen in such diametrically opposing ways, and makes me want to go back and read it again and try to see it from a different point of view.
Thanks for giving me something to think about today.
Amy, that’s exactly what I see as the beauty of this post — it’s not that I necessarily agree with everything said, or that anyone else necessarily should, or that any of it is right or wrong — it was the startling difference in perception that drew me in. Your disagreement with the views isn’t at all disrespectful; if we all agreed with everything, we’d have nothing to discuss, no debate, and no opportunity to think critically about the issue and form one’s own opinions. What I like so much about Sandra’s letter to Rose is that it provides an excellent platform for all of us to do exactly that: think, debate respectfully, and form opinions.
I never came away with the same impressions that Sandra did after reading Rose’s pieces of On the Way Home. It was fascinating to me that Sandra did — yet reading the letter, I can see exactly how she did. It’s good to see things through someone else’s eyes and see how they came away with something entirely different than you did — and then to stop and think about which perception — if either — was actually intended by the writer.
Diana brings up another such issue with her comment on the Lazy Lousy Lizy Jane song — intriguing and something else to think about and chew on for the day.
Wow! Reading all these comments reminds me of why I LOVE this blog. It’s so rich, and always makes me think. I don’t know if there are “blog awards”, but if there are, “Beyond Little House” should certainly win one!
This is why I have never liked Rose. The way she portrays her parents is so deliberately vindictive and hurtful, nothing she could ever say or do would convince me otherwise that she was a hateful woman.
When I was 9 years old I started to read the little house books. I loved the characters very much, and when my daughter was the same age, I tried her to read the books too, but she was not interested, too boring. Now that I am older, and read more about historie, the books are more like a fairytaile. (forgive me, my poor english but I am dutch). I don’t think that Rose was bitter about her parents, but gave them a more human sight. And I read also her biographie; the ghost in the house. Both mother and daughter wrote the storie, and perhaps Rose gave away a clue before she dies. I don’t think that Rose was vindictive, but after I read the books I think that Laura was not an easy person either.
Rose is believed to have been bi-polar, so, perhaps, she was experiencing a depressive/angry episode at the time that she wrote that.
As far as Rose being vindictive toward her mother’s success, I believe that is simply untrue.
Research regarding the correspondences between Rose & Laura suggest that Rose was responsible for a good portion of the editing work of Laura’s manuscripts, yet Rose always publicly denied it, and insisted that her mother deserved all the credit for the Little House manuscripts.
By the way, Rose was no slouch in the writing department.
She wrote biographies of Henry Ford and Henry Hoover, and was a decades long friend of former President Herbert Hoover.
Sandra,
It’s just literature, you know. Rose was a born writer. Where on earth does the disrespect come from? Without people like Rose there wouldn’t be any half-interesting books around…
You seem to harbour some generally fascinating attitudes i.e. the ‘expectation’ that children should somehow (even though they’re geriatrics themselves) automatically show their parents ‘respect’. Whatever that is. How simple, yet dull, life would be if we all turned out harmonious balanced and with absolutely no chips on our shoulders – constantly remembering our childhood through a rosy veneer. Hands up and be honest – how many of us would be able to seriously subscribe to that notion?
That aside. I can’t see anything disrespectful about Rose’s account in the The Long Way Home. She brings the book to life, and only opens up the reader’s eyes to the fact that there are not just one truth but many.
That’s what art is all about. Fear it not.
Ernest Hemingway~ Theres absolutely nothing noble in becoming superior to your fellow males. True the aristocracy is being superior for your former self.
I don’t think any of these examples are necessarily of Rose criticizing her parents. In the first, she is upset by being asked if she played with the $100 bill, but also scared because the money is missing, and it means that her family is homeless. She might be a little bit mad at her mother for asking (what child wouldn’t be), but I believe that the anger she portrays stems more from the missing money, rather than “I hate mommy”.
In the second, she is pointing out that her mother did not want her father to give any portion of their supplies to a stranger – one would expect Laura to sound sharp, but also to defer to her husband, which was typical of the times. Yes, she is pointing out that her parents occasionally disagreed, but that is normal. Luckily that scenario turned out for the best – Laura could have easily been right.
In the third scenario, I think Rose was criticizing herself. She was upset with herself for giving away the surprise, and beat herself up for it still, all those years later.
I do agree that Rose has issues, some of which stem from a difficult childhood. It must have been hard to be borne into a modern world by religious, post-Victorian parents. The early 20th century was a turning point for women, and Rose was swept into the wave of change. Her viewpoints were very different from those of her parents, and the personal information she shared was much more in-depth.
The Little House books would likely not exist without Rose. I don’t think she was necessarily their ghostwriter, but if she hadn’t helped, we wouldn’t have the books we know and love today. I think this portrayal of her parents shows them as real people, rather than the perfect characters we know from the books. In my eye, it lends validity to the books that stories about their characters can be told.
Rose Wilder Lane admitted that she was manic depressive, now we call it bipolar. Her bipolar is evident in her diary entries. She had a love-hate relationship with her mother. Rose was always wanting to write the “perfect story” & she was never happy with anything she wrote. I believe Rose was very much like her Aunt Eliza Jane. Bossy & a know-it-all. She was always trying to tell her parents what was best for them. As when she built the “Stone House” on Rocky Ridge Farm for them & she took over the “Old Farmhouse”. Laura & Almanzo didn’t like the new house & when Rose moved away, Almanzo & Laura moved back into the home they loved & so carefully built.
Rose’s “Free Land” & “Let the Hurricane Roar” was a depressing & gloomy read for me as a child & I reread both recently. I was still unimpressed with this dull effort by Rose. Her characters don’t appeal to me as the Charles & Caroline of the Little House books do. Her writing is somewhat erratic & the dialouge is confusing. Reading Rose’s short stories & novels always leaves me with the feeling that I have just read something written by a person with ADD.
Laura wrote poetry as a teenager. She wrote for the Missouri Ruralist as an adult. She painted. She had the talent long before Rose. When I read the articles in the Missouri Ruralist I read the Laura that wrote the Little House books. When I read anything by Rose I have a hard time finding anything that resembles the Little House stories. Laura Ingalls Wilder-storyteller. Rose Wilder Lane-good editor.
The thought that Rose was leaving a “clue” when she wrote the intro & ending to “On the Way Home”, look at my writing next to my mothers writing, makes no sense. Laura wrote “On the Way Home” as a journal, a diary. Not as a book that was ever meant to be published. It was curt & to the point because she was writing between cooking meals over a campstove & helping care for the animals & taking care of herself & family while under hot & dusty & tiring conditions. There wasn’t a lot of time for long & extensive writing while traveling from sunup to sunset with so many chores to do. OTWH was meant as a remembrance for Laura for when she was older. She could go back & read it & remember.