Writer Laura Ingalls Wilder at age 17, in 1994.Bettmann
We have reached the point in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter when the girls of the family, shut in by yet another blizzard, are playing "name the Bible verse" to break the monotony. It is 1880 in De Smet, in what is now South Dakota, the wind howls through the cracks in the little clapboard house, and the Ingalls girls can't get warm no matter how close they huddle to the coal stove.
It is 2014 in our cosy, centrally heated house in Toronto, where my nine-year-old daughter and I are curled up reading the sixth book of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Chronicle. The sibling rivalry between mildly rebellious Laura and pious, blind Mary is the only heated thing in that frigid little house as they compete to identify passages of scripture. Laura fails at the last verse. Matthew? Corinthians? A book noted for its clinical attention to detail is silent on the question.
"Wow," says my daughter, who is mastering the 500 shades of sarcasm that can colour one word. "That sounds like so much fun."
"Think of it as the 1880 version of Xbox," I say. "Don't worry. The winter only lasts another six months."
The copy of The Long Winter between us is missing its cover, and its pages are the colour of weak tea. It is my book from childhood. The copyright page says 1971. Two years ago, my daughter Maud and I started reading the series, beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, which was published in 1932. The eight books, which track the Ingalls' zigzagging journey across the Midwest in search of farm land, were my favourites when I was Maud's age. Despite her snarking (the apple truly lies at the foot of the tree), she loves the series as much as I did.
Is that improbable, or inevitable? History both repels and attracts. She is fascinated by the same things that I was: the idea that one stick of candy was unimaginable bounty at Christmas, or that a plague of grasshoppers could blacken the sky, or that you could make a football from a pig's bladder, or that a girl would spend most of her days doing chores, and her adult life in servitude to a husband and family. We both shrieked when Laura, in Little House on the Prairie, talked about wanting to steal "an Indian baby with bright black eyes."
The Indian issue is problematic (the Ingalls family once lived on land stolen from the Osage nation, for one thing.) The women's role is problematic. We talk about these things as we read, curled up under our duvet. What I haven't yet told Maud, and probably won't until she's older, is the bizarre backstory of the Little House series. They aren't just a set of famous children's books, which have sold more than 60 million copies and are taught in schools across America (and gave rise to a television series that bears no resemblance to the source material). They are a political manifesto, a work of historical revisionism and, perhaps most pertinent, the living testament of a cruel and tender bond between a mother and daughter.
That tortured bond, between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter and literary collaborator, Rose Wilder Lane, is found on nearly every page of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, a new book from the South Dakota Historical Society Press. Never mind the fire, famine and flood in the Little House books, the real drama lay in the relationship between Wilder and her only child, a famous writer in her own lifetime whose star has since been eclipsed by her mother's.
Nowhere in the books does it say that they are the result of the collaboration between Laura and Rose, although both were instrumental in the creation. Nowhere does it admit the Libertarian, anti-government ideology that drove them, but once you start to look, the message is everywhere. In The Long Winter, Laura is lectured on the benefits of self-sufficiency: "I hope you don't expect to depend on anyone else," Ma said, shocked. "A body can't do that."'
Rose Wilder Lane once wrote about her mother, "She made me so miserable as a child I that I never got over it." Yet she did get over it, to the benefit of both. In 1930, Rose was a successful short-story writer, novelist, and author of semi-fictional "biographies" of famous people, which inevitably enraged their subjects. That year, her mother, a farm wife but also a former columnist with the Missouri Ruralist newspaper, sat down to write a chronicle of the first 16 years of her life, when her itinerant family travelled from Wisconsin to Dakota Territory, battling cougars, Indians, natural disaster – and government red tape – along the way.
The memoir Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in 1930 was called Pioneer Girl, and it was intended for an adult audience. Rose edited the book, and used her own agent to send it out. No one wanted to publish it. But what, Rose wondered, if they were looking at the wrong audience? What if she took her mother's words, and experiences, and turned them into fiction for young readers? She wrote in her diary, "Working on my mothers story – stupidly. For will it come to anything?"
Rose changed the book radically: The first-person narrator became the fictionalized Laura, and she sharpened the narration to appeal to children (those wolves staring in the window!). The negotiating between mother and daughter fills the margins of the new annotated version of Pioneer Girl, published in its original version for the first time, with Laura often bowing to her daughter's demands. Rose, the celebrated author, considered her mother's efforts to be "small fry." As Judith Thurman wrote in a 2009 New Yorker story about the mother-daughter relationship, "Rose saw her mother as a literary apprentice, not as an artist."
And yet her mother was also a gold mine. Rose's career was in decline in the early 1930s, and she was profoundly depressed. What she saw in Pioneer Girl was a new, rich source of material for her own fiction. Even as she was editing her mother's stories to be suitable for children, she was repurposing – or stealing, if you prefer – the material for herself. In 1932, Rose published a novel, Let the Hurricane Roar, based on her mother's stories. Laura knew nothing of it until her daughter's novel appeared. It was, as Pamela Smith Hill writes with exquisite understatement in the introduction to Pioneer Girl, "a major betrayal of her trust in her daughter as editor and confidant."
What brought them back together was the success of the first book, Little House in the Big Woods, and the ideological mission they shared. That mission was laid out in a 2008 book, Little House, Long Shadow, by Anita Clair Fellman: "The collaboration between Wilder and Lane, occurring during the New Deal, which they both strongly opposed, heightened the stress they placed on individual and familial self-sufficiency in the books … the reader is tempted to conflate self-sufficiency with warm family life and to yearn for the entire package." Fellman argues that the quiet seductiveness of Wilder's and Lane's message helped break ground for the American conservative revolution of the 1980s.
In The Long Winter, for example, Wilder emphasizes her family's lone struggle by writing out of the picture the young couple who boarded with them in real life. At one point a neighbour exclaims, "The politicians are a-swarming in already, and ma'am if'n there's any worse pest than grasshoppers it's politicians. Why, they'll tax the lining out'n a man's pockets."
In other words, the books my daughter and I love are propaganda. Worse, they're propaganda espousing a message I hate. As we're lying under the duvet, I consider telling Maud about Rose and Laura's story, about their fraught relationship which survived with love, and created this flawed, beautiful thing. I consider telling her that we must never collaborate on a book, or if we do we must lay in a lot of wine. Instead, we just keep reading, while the wind howls outside two houses, worlds apart.
Elizabeth Renzetti is a Globe and Mail columnist and the author of the novel Based on a True Story.