Book review: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2015 was Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  This was Wilder's "first draft" of the Little House series.  The South Dakota Historical Society Press published it in December 2014 and immediately sold out of the first printing.  Did they really think they wouldn't?  Tommy ordered it for me at Christmas, but it ended up being a birthday present, as the order wasn't filled until March, when they finally started to catch up to demand.

If you've read the Little House books (and if you haven't, go read them first before turning to this), there will be very little to surprise you here, and if you've done any supplemental reading on Wilder's life, such as Donald Zochert's biography, there will be even less.  To me, the greatest value of this book is the revelation that Wilder's first draft was, in fact, so similar to the finished product, not the barely-literate oral history that Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed into a literary classic and patronizingly allowed her mother to take the credit for, as many literary historians have asserted. Their evidence for doing so seems to be outright bigotry: that a woman who lived virtually her whole life as a housewife on a farm couldn't possibly have produced a work of such talent or lasting influence.  Much more likely that it was the extensively-traveled, feminist, divorced daughter, though it's puzzling why she never broke out any of that literary genius on a book published under her own name.