Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Laura and Rose

A new book explores the collaboration between author Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. (Via LRC)
Only 19 years between them, Lane and Wilder at times seemed as close as competitive sisters. Both were serious and accomplished writers. But Hill presents Wilder as the better storyteller and Lane as the broad-thinking editor. Their lifestyles reflected this. Where Wilder stayed close to the family's final homestead in the Missouri Ozarks, Lane cut her journalistic teeth in San Francisco and traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East. It was with this same vigor that Lane took up editing and rewriting her mother's manuscripts for "the big market."
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Probably was not only a personality difference but a generational difference. Also, Rose Had her father's gene's as well, and he was one to strike out into unknown territory.

Anonymous said...

I read another version of the story this past summer, it was in the local library, and it basically made the claim that Lane was the real writer behind the Little House series, she cleaned up poorly written manuscripts of her mother----it was sad, because I had read the series as a girl, and the reality behind them became tarnished---This new book seems to shine a kinder light on the situation.

Anonymous said...

Lane had the benefit of more education than her pioneer mother, but without the mother's rough manuscripts, the stories would not have existed with the details of pioneer life that we so enjoy in the books.