That's my plan for Christmas vacation - just got them all from Amazon! I haven't read them in decades - looking forward to traveling back to a simpler (even if difficult) time (while in front of a warm fire with a big box of Cheeze-its!).But I am rereading the Little Prairie books by Laura Wilder
I recently got Prairie Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder from the library. I found myself attracted mostly to the copious footnotes.The editor explained that Laura was a retired newspaper columnist in 1929 when, apparently as a reaction to the death of Mary Ingalls, she started to handwrite Prairie Girl, the title she chose when she wrote her memoir. Her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was a prosperous novelist at the time, and had just built a house for her parents to move to while she stayed in her childhood home. The Depression reversed Rose’s fortunes, and she had to scratch to sell books and her investments, instead of doubling as she expected, crashed.
Praire Girl was never published as such, until now. The editor who did publish it, with much commentary which was the fruit of considerable research, says that we would not now know of Laura Ingalls Wilder or of Rose Wilder Lane, but for Laura’s writing Prairie Girl and giving it to her daughter to try to get it published. The Little House series, of which Big Woods and Farmer Boy were the first two, eventually put Laura and Rose back on solid financial ground. Prairie Girl was adult nonfiction. The Little House series was not.
Love Laura, Rose and especially Ma & Pa. The writing is simple, elegant and evocative. Those books should be forced-fed to children of liberal parents!
I can’t remember what happened to poor Mary after she went blind.
If you like cooking, the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook is a must. It is a very serious study of the foods that the family ate.