Pioneer Girl

There is so much to love in this book! The introductory essay to Pioneer Girl describes Rose Wilder Lane's influence on Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing of the original story, the search for a publisher, and the process of refining the story so that it became the Little House on the Prairie series. The essay is followed by the text of Pioneer Girl, which is exhaustively annotated with notes from historical sources or additional information about the text. After the text, there are appendices with additional stories, and photographs of corrected typescript from one of Wilder's manuscripts. Scattered throughout the entire book are photographs of the people from the stories, and illustrations from the original books.

Pioneer Girl includes some stories that were later left out of the Little House on the Prairie books. There are people struggling with alcoholism or bad marriages, mean spirited people in romantic rivalries and opportunistic wheeler-dealers. In the story of the hard winter of 1880-1881, we find out that the Ingalls had another young family staying with them through the winter, and that it created a lot of tension in the household. It's fascinating to see the fuller picture of life in pioneer settlements, and the Laura in this book comes across as aware of people's foibles and able to protect herself from them. Wilder's writing in this version is more like the newspaper column writer that she was for many years–events are reported more briefly than in later versions of the story, with a reliance on small details rather than elaboration to convey the events' significance.

I read this book slowly, with fascination, over the course of 4 months. It's a book to go back to, to learn from all the supplementary material, or just to enjoy the gem of the story.