A Little House Sampler by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane (review)

72 Western American Literature A Little House Sampler. By Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. Edited by William T. Anderson. (Lincoln and London: University ofNebraska Press, 1988, 243 pages, $15.95.) This collection of miscellaneous writings, almost none available elsewhere, extends and complicates our picture of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. As arranged by William T. Anderson, the selections and photographs in this handsome volume create a roughly chronological narra­ tive, emphasizing the two women’s mutual, separate emergence as writers— the chroniclers and inventors of the Little House mythology. For fans and scholars alike, the book is a bonanza. It allows us to trace Wilder’s location of the voice and style which would eventually propel the Little House series, through her 1911-1927 articles for The Missouri Ruralist, including housekeeping advice, meditations on rural life, and reminiscences of prairie childhood. Wilder’s sharp eye and her commitment to full human dignity for girls and women appear in her amused notes on local customs and the speeches she made in her campaign to establish restrooms and gathering places for farm women in Ozark towns. Her 1937 “Book Fair Speech” provides an indispensable description of the Little House series as it was emerging in her imagination, halfway through the project. The Sampler’s picture of Lane, although less familiar, is equally engross­ ing. Just as her mother left her parents’ Dakota homestead to pioneer with Almanzo Wilder in Florida “piney woods” and Missouri Ozarks, Lane left the Ozark farm to discover early success as a celebrated San Francisco journalist and then as a fiction writer who began to mine and to mythologize her family’s history in popular stories and novels. Her career is tellingly poised between Depression-era Western literary escapism and modernist experiment. The short fiction here seems surprisingly fresh; especially when she employs an unsenti­ mental child’s voice, Lane can achieve the fumbling acuity of a Sherwood Anderson. William T. Anderson provides a useful, graceful biographical-historical framework for each selection. However, like many of Wilder and Lane’scritics, he refers to them in affectionate, intimate language which seems to discourage our reading their work with the full critical seriousness it merits. Scholars may also wish for a full bibliography. A Little House Sampler allows us to trace a western storytelling heritage through three generations of an extraordinary and representative American family. Perhaps the book’s most suggestive contribution is its tracing of a com­ plex and fruitful mother-daughter literary relationship. Anderson’s invaluable collection reveals two fine western women writers, discovering and nurturing their own and each other’s gifts. ANN ROMINES George Washington University ...