I’ve been re-reading the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I first read when I was about ten years old. Like a lot of girls, I was fascinated with the pioneers and they way they lived, as depicted in Wilder’s books and in the TV show that was on the air at the time (it was my favourite show, and one of the only TV programs I was allowed to watch).

But in revisiting the books, I’ve been completely enthralled by how well-written they are. This is something I must have sensed when I first read the books, as it was this quality that kept me reading, then. But as an adult, I’m immediately struck by the clarity and precision of Wilder’s prose. The books were written for younger readers, so they have a simplicity about them, but even so the pared-down language is delightfully expressive.

From the first in the series, Little House in the Big Woods:

With the butcher knife Ma cut the big, orange-colored pumpkins into halves. She cleaned the seeds out of the center and cut the pumpkin into long slices, from which she pared the rind. Laura helped her cut the slices into cubes…At other times they had baked Hubbard squash for dinner. The rind was so hard that Ma had to take Pa’s ax to cut the squash into pieces. When the pieces were baked in the oven, Laura loved to spread the soft insides with butter and then scoop the yellow flesh from the rind and eat it. Wilder doesn’t waste a word.

It’s become clear through historical research into Wilder’s work that her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was instrumental in editing and shaping her mother’s books and making them more publishable (particularly in adapting Laura’s memoir Pioneer Girl into a series of children’s novels), and I also know that the two of them had a fraught relationship. An annotated version of Pioneer Girl was finally published a couple of years ago, and it’s worth checking out, to see the process that Laura’s original manuscript went through, to result in these lovely, evocative books.

The illustration here is by the wonderful Garth Williams, who illustrated mid-century versions of all these books, as well as another favourite, Charlotte’s Web.

Little master class on the prairie