Little House on the Prairie

"In contrast to Alice In Wonderland , my next book is the Little House on the Prairie by Lauren Ingalls Wilder, where the family has to negotiate and find out what the rules are for living in the wilds of the American West. Their very lives are in danger and they have to come to terms with nature. They have to come to terms with the things that people now take for granted, for instance, having a house. One of the sections that I focused on when I was preparing for this, was where they’re building a log cabin. The theme of this book is the importance of the family relationship, that is what holds them together, this is how they survive. It’s a book about the early settlers and their struggles against nature, against or competing with other indigenous inhabitants—and all of this is set against the basic practicalities of finding food and shelter. The struggle of man against the wilderness is a theme which runs throughout American literature. The mother is a stoical forbearing woman and the children are very strictly disciplined. Laura is seen as a rather more adventurous child compared with her older sister. But there is still that strict code of behaviour from the Puritan roots of those very early settlers that is built in. That whole moral code is built into the book as well. It is, it gives you rules to live by. When I talk to my students and we do Alice in Wonderland , a lot of them will find it very disconcerting. “Their very lives are in danger and they have to come to terms with nature. They have to come to terms with the things that people now take for granted” It strikes me that there is also a comparison with Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Defoe goes into detail about survival to the point that you can learn how to save and plant wheat seed, where you can build a fence in order to keep your goats, where you can forage and how to make your own clothing and make bread. This was a way of informing people about these kinds of things in a society where they’ve become distanced from practicalities. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There is a connection in that Laura Ingalls Wilders’ work is re-educating generations of Americans about where their history has come from."

"First and foremost place and the fact that these are pioneer novels. This series brings to life the Midwest of the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s America: Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, Missouri. These were the places where the real author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, lived. Of course, when you read them as an older person, you realise that the attitudes—particularly to First Nation Americans—are terrible. Because although these pioneers were courageous and extraordinary in their own way, they were taking somebody else’s land. The reason I loved these books so much when I first read them was that it was a family where the two parents loved each other. I think people forget how rare seeing a positive marriage with children is in fiction. The father and the mother still love each other and they are good people. Their oldest daughters are Laura and Mary, then there is baby Carrie, and later in the series, Grace comes along. It’s all about the hardness of day-to-day life, much as I tried to create in The Map of Bones and my Huguenot pioneers. It’s about life lived in this huge landscape. It’s about that tension between girls and boys and what is expected, and the role of the church and religion. Much like in that other American classic, Little Women , it presents different kinds of girlhood. When I was growing up, we all wanted to be George in Blyton’s The Famous Five , and Jo in Little Women because they were not passive or quiet, they had character. Like that, we all wanted to be Laura, because she is an explorer, she’s curious, she doesn’t care if she looks pretty or has bows in her hair. May does that. Laura has a sense of being the ordinary child. There’s a wonderful poem by Philip Larkin on the birth of one of Kingley Amis’s daughters, Sally. It’s about, essentially, wishing that she will be ordinary—so she’ll be able to live a happy life as herself. Have, like other women, An average of talents: Not ugly, not good-looking, Nothing uncustomary To pull you off your balance, I think this is what is at the heart of the appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I just loved these books. I would sit and read them in my garden in Sussex, imagining myself out on the plains and the prairies. It’s the same landscape I later rediscovered in Willa Cather, the great American writer of the turn of the century, who wrote about tough women who just got on with their lives. Of course, in The Map of Bones , those Huguenot women are the same types of women. No fuss, no self pity. They have the guns, get the water from the well, drive the carriages. They were extraordinary. I think it’s more that, given I’m a women, why wouldn’t I be writing about women? It doesn’t seem odd to me that I would do that. The way I write is that I have a strong sense of the sort of story I’m going to tell. It’s always a triangle between place, history, and character. But, for me, place comes first. I don’t decide that I’m going to have this woman or that person. I start writing and see who turns up. And, in every case bar one, a woman has turned up. In The Winter Ghosts , a male protagonist—Freddie—turned up. But I write plenty of male characters, supporting leads if you like. Citadel , in particular—although the lead character is female, Sandrine—is really a novel about two people. The whole Joubert Family Chronicles begins with a Hugenot boy and a Catholic girl falling in love. For me, I think it’s simply that I always loved history but realised that women’s stories were not there. Even now, I fear only about 5% of the history syllabus in schools involves women as principal characters. This is just wrong. And inaccurate … When I was setting up the Women’s Prize for Fiction back in the early 1990s, I explained to my amazing parents why we were doing it. My Dad thought a while, then said: ‘I understand, darling. It’s about getting a bigger table and more chairs.’ That’s the point. It’s not about taking men out. It’s about adding the women, girls, and everybody back where they belong and where they always were. Fiction or non-fiction, that’s what matters to me: telling the whole story. Kate Mosse’s The Map of Bones is out now. Feminist History for Every Day of the Year publishes 18 September"