At the very end Laura does recommit to the life of a farming family and to the persistence that it requires, but it feels like she’s embracing this commitment not because it’s an overarching faith but simply because she can hardly do anything else except go on working and living. It’s hard to see any overarching lesson at all, actually. But there’s no overarching lesson of self-reliance that shapes this book. Much of the gift for storytelling that you see in the other books remains in this one, such as when Almanzo gets lost in a blizzard merely on his way from the barn to the house. We can never know what Wilder herself would have done with future drafts.īut her voice is heavily reportorial, and intensely descriptive. It’s an unfinished work, of course, and merely a first draft. It’s not that Laura and Almanzo are made to seem dour here, but their life is revealed as harsh and uncertain, with little-to-no payback or progress. There are hardly any episodes even of fun and laughter. All this is reported without sentimentality or overt drama – and certainly without uplifting lessons. By contrast, in “The First Four Years” we get a succession of setbacks and tragedies: the Wilder crop is destroyed repeatedly, their house burns down, and their infant son dies. (Events that she wanted to take out but Wilder insisted on keeping include Mary’s blindness and the laborers’ riot near the Silver Lake settlement).
Rose Wilder Lane wanted to tell a story of self-reliant and successful pioneers, so one thing she did was to take out certain events, like the death of Laura’s baby brother, Charles Frederick. The language is more plain, but the book feels more honest. This book, as is well known, was never edited by her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and is very different from the other Little House books.
In this novel I feel like I’m reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pure voice for the first time.
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