I’ve been doing a lot of writing about Laura lately. On the one side I’m crafting various drafts of a press release about LauraPalooza. On the other, I’m creating reprint articles as well as working on myriad new articles for the next issue of the Homesteader. And I keep running up against the same issue: how to refer to Laura.
See, I did it right there. I called her Laura. Way back when I began the Homesteader, I made it a style point to always refer to her as “Laura” rather than “Wilder,” even though that goes against newswriting convention. But I just can’t think of her as a surname. I’m not a Wilder fan; I’m a Laura fan. I don’t go to Wilder homesites; I go to Laura homesites. I don’t visit Wilder museums; I visit Laura museums. I may, however, be a Little House fan going to Little House homesites and visiting Little House museums. But when I have to refer to an actual person, it’s Laura every time. In fact, barred from saying just her first name, I’d probably opt for her full name, Laura Ingalls Wilder, rather than simply “Wilder.”
I wonder why this is. I’ve been pondering it, and best I can come up with is that I’m not talking about merely an author. She’s also a character, the character who stars in my very favorite books of all time. And then, just to complicate matters, that “character” grew up and out of the Little House books to live a long, rich life with her farmer beau and her pioneer past to draw from for stories. I can’t separate the character from the person. I can’t separate the author from the little girl in braids or from the teenager with bangs and long skirts that brush her shoetops.
I once saw a calling card that had belonged to Laura. The name on it was “Laura Wilder.” I remember being amused with how strange that seemed to me. She was this whole other person in so many ways — Laura Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mrs. AJ Wilder, Bessie, Mama Bess.
But she’ll always just be Laura to me.
When I read her name Laura Wilder it appears to me somehow incomplete, but I think this is only out of habit.
I really don’t like “Mrs. A.J. Wilder” because the suffragette within me opines that she isn’t treated like a person in her own right by using her husbands initials instead of her own first name.
I hope not to offend anybody but when I read her nickname Bess or Bessie I think of a cow in the first place because when I was a child we had a reddish-brown cow called Bessie.
It’s not a dogma but usually I refer to her this way:
I use “Laura” when I write about the literary character in her books.
When I write about the real woman, especially the author, I name her “Laura Ingalls Wilder”, often shortened LIW.
(Fast spoken in German, the initials are pronounced as a single word, which sounds like “Ellie-We”. That’s why I like the abbreviation so much.)