Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books by Christine Woodside

Author:Christine Woodside [Woodside, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-09-05T22:00:00+00:00

8

LIBERTARIANS IN CONNECTICUT

“I owe Rose, for helping me, at first, in selling my books and for the publicity she gave them.”

—Laura, in a letter to literary agent George Bye in 1949

During the spring of 1940, Rose lived frugally in Danbury. She survived on garden produce and food shared with her neighbors. It was the sort of simple life that she’d known as a child and portrayed as desirable in the Little House books. But Rose was in distress. She wrote in her diary on May 9, 1940: “Something must be done to enable me to write fiction. I have no ideas whatever, no spark, I see no stories, I do not desire to write. I am living on borrowed money…. Have just looked through the notebooks of twenty years ago; that ‘I’ no longer exists. What interests me now? I kept those notes because I was interested. Perhaps, in gear, the wheels may turn the engine. But truly I would prefer to die.”

She was fifty-three. Rose had been depressed before, but now she and Laura had reversed roles. Rose was a struggling homesteader, relying on help from her mother, while Laura was a bourgeois author, basking in her admirers’ praise, collecting armfuls of fan letters, banking more money than she had ever thought she would earn. And Rose was obligated to keep this going.

Two years earlier, Laura advised Rose to cut income and avoid taxes. “Couldn’t you work less and pay less and get by just as well?” Laura had suggested. “I mean—You say you can live in your Connecticut place for $500. Suppose then you write enough to earn $1,000. That would cut out the tax and be as much for you as though you earned twice as much and gave 1/2 to Roosevelt. The figures are not right of course but there’s the idea. As you say ‘Dam’ ’em.”

Rose appeared to follow that course, earning only a little money writing short articles on women and needlework for a new magazine, Woman’s Day. The magazine offered much lower rates than she’d been used to. And when the editor’s assistant wrote to her asking for a biographical sketch, Rose squirmed and complained to her diary that this had to be the lowest she’d sunk.

Rose’s articles for Woman’s Day suggest she yearned for something settled and traditional that she had never sought nor obtained as an adult. In “All Men Are Liars,” which appeared alongside a piece by J. P. McEvoy that claimed women never told the truth, Rose painted the picture of a trusting wife: “Of course (for she has no fear of the truth) his wife sees him as he is—an ordinary man, a human being who has had the nerve and endurance and courage to live fifty years or so, to marry, raise a family, pay the bills, build a house and carry the mortgage, to keep on living valiantly through triumph and disaster, and to hold the respect of honorable men and the steadfast affection of his wife, who is herself an ordinary woman.

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