Laura and Rose

The pioneers weren’t psalm-singers…; they believed in God; they kept their powder dry, and prayed later….Courage isn’t a matter of religion; it’s a matter of character. And human courage has always been adequate to the demands made upon it.

—ROSE WILDER LANE

Nineteen ninety-three was a landmark year in Laura Ingalls Wilder scholarship because The Ghost in the Little House by Dr. William Holtz, professor of English literature at the University of Missouri, was published. It is a biography of Rose Wilder Lane. This book revealed that Rose, a noted fiction writer and burgeoning political thinker, had donated considerable amounts of her professional time and talents to improving and even rewriting the famous Little House series. The collaboration began when she lived with Laura and Almanzo in the late 1920s and didn’t end until the final book was done. Indeed, Dr. Holtz credited much of the polish and smooth narrative development of the series to Rose’s professionalism and experience.

Because of these new insights into the Little House books, Rose’s quotation, which begins this chapter, deserves special note. She was in the process of changing her whole political philosophy around the time she made these remarks in 1933, and they reveal how different her view of faith was from that of her mother. Dr. Holtz noted that later in her life Rose was an active participant at King Street Christian Church in Danbury, Connecticut, but it was hard to know what she believed. So daughter Rose may eventually have been something of a religious person, but she wasn’t for much of her life and certainly not in the pioneer tradition of her mother.

In fact, it is possible that Rose may have tried to downplay her mother’s faith in the Little House books. For example, in Laura’s original Pioneer Girl manuscript she spoke several times about asking for forgiveness for wrongdoing. But this act of contrition did not show up as many times in the Little House series. However, admittedly, that subtle difference may provide scant actual proof.

What is more certain is that Rose, as a daughter and editor and rewriter of her mother’s work, praised the virtues of self-reliance and hardy individuality over other qualities in the pioneers. In many ways, to Rose, man really was the “master of his fate.” Humans were the measure of all things, while nature, at best, was indifferent to man and didn’t tell him anything about man, let alone testify to the glory of God (see Psalm 19:1).

A Classic Series Is Wrought in Spite of Difficulties

Hence, mother and daughter had to grope their way forward to a mutual story line for the Little House series, with the cooperation not always being easy. One of my contacts in Mansfield told me that with Laura and Rose, “blood was thicker than water.” But both women did some bleeding before the work on the books was finished.

Practically all fans and scholars of Laura and Rose agree they shared similar personalities. And I agree as well. Both of them truly liked getting their own way, sometimes to the point of obsession.

For Mama Bess, getting her own way might have meant using manipulative tears to persuade Almanzo that he really did want to finish the twenty-eight-foot chimney for their fireplace, built with rocks gathered at the farm itself! This would not have been easy work for Almanzo, partially handicapped and standing at only five foot six. But Laura got her way, and the chimney to this day is a beautiful thing to behold as it climbs the side of their Rocky Ridge house a mile outside of Mansfield, near the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum.

A neighbor once remarked to Laura that she always seemed to know how to get what she wanted, and Laura readily admitted that this was so. She was a leader and probably had the proverbial type A personality. Good leaders know how to get their way, and this also may be how they determine they are good leaders!

For all practical purposes, it was Laura who chose the very land the family was going to call their own, right near the town, when they first arrived in 1894. Yes, there was always a discussion with Almanzo before they moved ahead—on what Laura had already planned to do anyway.

The land that came to be named Rocky Ridge fits its name and sits on a hilltop overlooking a lot of land that would have been easier to farm. When the Wilders arrived, only about five of the forty acres had been improved—the rest was woods and brush. Even today anyone examining the place must wonder what kind of farmland Almanzo would have chosen if it had been his choice alone. Surely, the ground would have been flatter. Rocky Ridge deserved its name, as they picked up rock off the farm for years before Almanzo could really turn the soil or raise crops on it.

Fortunately for the man of the place, a previous settler had laid by those apple seedlings referred to earlier, and Almanzo used those trees as a start on making the farm pay. Although apple trees could take about seven years to bear fruit, the land immediately produced a wood crop for several years. Laura learned to use and then became proficient in using a crosscut saw for harvesting lumber. After some land was cleared, a small grain crop could be raised. Odd jobs, however, had to be Almanzo’s lifeblood in the short term.

Mrs. Wilder was a helper, but she was also chief director. Mama Bess didn’t even leave the preparation of the house’s foundation to Almanzo but instead kept insisting that new carpenters be tried until a good one was found who would lay a foundation to her satisfaction. Since the house is still firmly standing, she must have been right!

The fact is, this tendency to lead or be in control is not something Laura ever hid. In These Happy Golden Years, the last book of the original Little House series, eighteen-year-old Laura makes it clear to Almanzo, twenty-eight, that although she loves him, she is uncomfortable with using the customary word obey in the marriage ceremony. She doesn’t want to make a pretense or be untruthful or agree that a man is always right just because he is a man. Almanzo willingly agrees, as does Reverend Brown, but her stipulation was hardly typical of teenage girls of the 1880s.

Still, Laura learned, if she did not know it then, that total control over our lives is denied to us all. In Rose, she produced a daughter every bit as strong willed as she. Although the love between them was strong and abiding, at times they rubbed each other raw and went off in different directions.

For Rose, life was not a garden and her childhood was not a happy one according to many biographers. Right from the start, she found herself at odds with the town school. As a country child, she felt she was a poor and shabby specimen beside the town girls, who wore store-bought clothes. It didn’t help much that she rode to school on a donkey, which was an embarrassment itself. Also, in her estimation the teachers were boring and, what was worse, stupid, according to her way of thinking.

Personally, I doubt any school or teacher could have pleased Rose when she was already so superior to other children in her intellectual prowess. She had an eye for facts and stuck to her guns when teachers were careless with them. She always won the school spelling bees. Standing out as a scholar only made her more isolated from others who sought popularity over academic achievement. It seems she eventually began skipping school to study at home, borrowing heavily from a neighbor’s library to make up for the lack of class time.

Yet how difficult was her childhood really? Rose always could tell a good tale of woe and often did in diaries she later kept. She was undoubtedly fortunate to have had the parents she did. Few others of that time and place would have put up with her rebellious antics, which were those of a gifted, frustrated child. One thing I can’t and won’t believe is that Laura deliberately neglected her daughter, though some scholars have suggested it.

What Have I Raised?

One thing is clear: Laura was beside herself over what to do as Rose matured into her high school years. Then help came from startling quarters: Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer—the “lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane” of Laura’s own not-always-obedient youth—offered to take Rose on.

This was none other than Almanzo’s “bossy” sister from down south. Of the circumstances we know little. Had Laura and Eliza Jane somehow reconciled? There is just no family record. It is possible that Laura was beginning to realize she could no longer control her adventurous and now sexually curious daughter. So Rose was sent to live with her aunt Lizy Jane in Crowley, Louisiana, where she would attend high school.

The move to Crowley must have been liberating for Rose, but it didn’t last long as she finished her only year of high school at the top of her class, cramming four years of Latin into one, among other academic achievements. She also had time for a beau, her first. Rose had a lively mind that quickly absorbed new ideas, and she was on her way as a “bachelor girl.” No way would she become a farmer’s wife; she would have a career. All these developments certainly must have fueled, not diminished, her mother’s worries. The strong egos of both women didn’t always make for easy going, either then or later on when work on the Little House series began. The fact that they were not religiously close did not help. In any case, in just a few years Rose learned telegraphy, married real estate salesman Gillette Lane, and settled in San Francisco, where opportunities seemed boundless at the turn of the twentieth century. Although a number of business ventures with Gillette had already revealed weaknesses in his abilities and in their marriage, the City by the Bay brought new promise. Rose and Gillette thought they’d make their fortune in California.

What Laura, with a more traditional morality and lifestyle, felt about all these ventures can only be understood indirectly from what she revealed in her writing for magazines and newspapers. On the one hand, she made it clear that she did not approve of young girls abandoning their role as home keepers, according to a McCall’s article from 1919. On the other, she was happy for their liberation into new horizons too. No longer did unmarried women have to be considered just old maids, but new freedom didn’t necessarily strengthen the home either. Laura had to learn to live with this dilemma herself, an idea she reflected in a 1918 Ruralist article:

There were old maids when I was a girl. Later some of the older girls protested against being called old maids and insisted on being called “bachelor girls.” There was some controversy over the question….[But] I lost sight of it and awakened later to the fact that both old maids and bachelor girls had disappeared….In their place are simply women, young women, older women…and widows, with the descriptive adjective in the background, but nowhere in the world, I think, are there any old maids.

As one considers the subject, it becomes plain that this one fact contains the whole story and explanation of the change in the world for women….In the days when old maids flourished, the one important fact in a woman’s life was whether or not she were married and as soon as a girl child reached maturity she was placed in one of two classes and labeled accordingly.

There is every indication that as Laura saw her daughter embark on a writing career at the San Francisco Bulletin, she found inspiration to undertake a similar career of her own. But did she approve of some of Rose’s more unconventional friends? On that she was silent. The agnosticism of some of them might have been a problem; still, she was beginning to follow the path of her daughter—one pioneer following in the steps of another pioneer.

Roles Are Reversed

A visit to Rose in 1915 found Laura eager to learn from her daughter-mentor the secrets of how to construct articles for the big national publications as a way of adding to the farm income. The money was needed. Whatever payments she was then receiving from the Ruralist would have been insignificant, maybe five to ten dollars per column at most, though her production for that paper increased dramatically in 1916.

Rose’s earliest fiction appeared in serial form in the San Francisco Bulletin and was predictable, down to the happy endings for its aspiring protagonists. She wrote for the women’s page of the paper, and the stories were rather pedestrian and even simplistic by today’s standards. William Holtz has called the work “shamelessly clichéd romances.”

It is not surprising, then, that mother and daughter collaborated on a series of poems for children while they were feeling their way toward better writing. Laura’s efforts later appeared in the book Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Fairy Poems, but this effort by Rose comes from the Bulletin itself.

Under the stone that lies flat and brown,

Down in the path by the garden wall,

There is a city built upside-down,

Houses, and gardens, and parks and all….

There live the Ant-People, in the dark,

Bringing the little Ant-Babies up;

Ant-Nurses carry them in the park,

When they are good they have honey to sup.

High in the grass-tops the Ant-Cows roam,

Ant-Papas watch them with care lest they fall,

Milk them of honey, at night herd them home,

Bedding them safe in the Ant-Cows’ stall.

Rose’s superiorities as a writer have often been proclaimed, but it is good to know that both women had to grow from rather humble beginnings. Rose’s reputation for skill and for meeting tight deadlines developed early in her career and allowed her to actually make a living as a writer, something that was hard to do then and hard to do today. Laura’s recognition as a storyteller came later and only with the publication of her Little House series, beginning when she was sixty-five.

The historical record for the development of the children’s series is well recorded, yet each account varies as to who should get credit for what it is that makes the stories shine as no other stories about the settling of the West do. I maintain that it is the stamp of the mother’s religious beliefs; her philosophy, along with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that “homekeeping hearts are happiest”; and her sharp eye for domestic detail that are the crucial ingredients in the genius of the Little House books. Whatever struggles Laura and Rose may have gone through as mother and daughter, when it comes to the children’s books themselves, it is the mother’s story and not the daughter’s editing that has counted for making them memorable and loved.

And whatever else they are, Laura’s books are a story about building a home in the wilderness; they are not about raw nature itself, however raw that nature can be. No, the Christian family values of the books are overwhelming. The sacredness of home and hearth are everywhere present.

By contrast, Rose’s growing view was that America is a land of self-made heroes. She expressed this first in Let the Hurricane Roar, but that is by no means the only place she expressed her belief in individualism as the highest philosophy. Dr. Holtz has pointed out that practically the whole of the Independence Day celebration described in Little Town on the Prairie is Rose’s contrivance. There at the Fourth of July event, a budding politician raises his voice to praise “the glorious Fourth.” America had done right to cast off a tyrannical power like Great Britain that had murdered women and children and encouraged Indian attacks on the defenseless.

The speaker goes on to tell of brave deeds done in Mexico and of opposition to tyrants who might be tempted to take advantage of a young country. But his main theme is that true Americans have always been self-reliant and have never needed help from anyone. We are a virtuous people who have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

While the Stars and Stripes flutters in the breeze, the Declaration of Independence is read aloud. A young Laura and Carrie had supposedly learned it by heart. And at the end of the reading, they feel like saying “Amen.”

Then, perhaps as a result of Rose’s influence, Laura wrote that Pa starts to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and others join in. After the song, Laura seems to have a moment of enlightenment when she concludes, “Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences.” Then there is another paragraph that strays into the area of natural law and its meaning for Americans.

According to Dr. Holtz, these ideas represent Rose’s newfound and burgeoning political philosophy and are not part of what Laura originally wrote. Of course, I do not think the strong-willed Laura would have been bowled over by her daughter—she must have thought in some way along these lines or wouldn’t have approved the changes. Both of them were conservative women, and Laura would have especially agreed with the sentence that reads, “God is America’s king.”

What Is True Pioneering?

How different Laura’s pioneers are from those of Rose when Laura is in control of her own narrative! Her family—though often isolated and struggling to find affordable land—still reached out to fellow settlers, which I would describe as following the admonition of Jesus to serve him by helping “the least of these.” In one instance, in By the Shores of Silver Lake, the family puts a light in their window to guide folk lost along an unmarked trail (a historical fact, by the way). Laura’s heroes were those who shared their goods with others, fellow pioneers journeying toward mutual fellowship and prosperity. For a settler can prosper and also hope that his neighbor prospers too.

Laura’s prairie also taught lessons about a personal God—not just an abstract force but an ever-present Spirit, “a rock in a weary land, a shelter in the time of storm.” As for the mysteries of human suffering, great life lessons could be learned at the hands of inevitable sorrow. No impersonal deity had forced them onto the prairie; they had chosen the risk for themselves, but they still needed his comfort and aid, for the task of pioneering was too big without him.

In a touching passage recorded in Little Town on the Prairie, Laura showed how her own faith in God had grown because of her sister Mary’s struggle with blindness:

Mary had always been good. Sometimes she had been so good that Laura could hardly bear it. But now she seemed different….

“You used to try all the time to be good,” Laura said. “And you always were good. It made me so mad sometimes, I wanted to slap you. But now you are good without even trying.”…

“I’m not really [good],” Mary told her. “I do try, but if you could see how rebellious and mean I feel sometimes, if you could see what I really am, inside, you wouldn’t want to be like me.”

“I can see what you’re like inside,” Laura contradicted. “It shows all the time. You’re always perfectly patient and never the least bit mean.”

“I know why you wanted to slap me,” Mary said. “It was because I was showing off. I wasn’t really wanting to be good. I was showing off to myself, what a good little girl I was, and being vain and proud, and I deserved to be slapped for it.”

Laura was shocked. Then suddenly she felt that she had known that, all the time. But, nevertheless, it was not true of Mary. She said, “Oh no, you’re not like that, not really. You are good.”

“We are all desperately wicked and inclined to evil as the sparks fly upwards,” said Mary, using the Bible words. “But that doesn’t matter.”

“What!” cried Laura….

“I don’t know how to say what I mean very well. But—it isn’t so much thinking, as—as just knowing. Just being sure of the goodness of God.”

Laura stood still….There Mary stood in the midst of the green and flowery miles of grass rippling in the wind, under the great blue sky and white clouds sailing, and she could not see. Everyone knows that God is good. But it seemed to Laura then that Mary must be sure of it in some special way.

I feel sure these reflections were genuine, right from Laura’s heart. The greatness and goodness of God—how Laura dwelled on this theme in all her writing! In her columns and in her books, she returned time and again to Bible-informed perspectives.

In a November 1923 column she observed,

It seems to be instinctive for the human race to give thanks for benefits bestowed by a Higher Power….A beneficent providence…has given us the harvest as well as countless other blessings thru the year. This is just another touch of nature that makes the whole world kin and links the present with the far distant past.

Mankind is not following a blind trail….Let us, with humble hearts, give thanks for the revelation [given] to us and our better understanding of the greatness and goodness of God.

In another column, she remarked that the greatness and goodness of God could even be found in everyday chores, for “to sweep a room as to God’s laws, makes that, and the action fine.” This is a notion that almost seems quaint in our own times when so much religious writing emphasizes biblical principles that reveal “what’s in it for me?” and so little is said about following and serving and washing each other’s feet.

In another article, written in January 1919 when she was almost fifty-two years old—an age by which most people are well established in their views about faith matters—Laura revealed her spiritual sensitivity in her regret about possibly offending another woman. I maintain that her attitude revealed here—as well as her willingness to state this in a public forum—is strong evidence of a godly person responding to the nudges of the Spirit:

Mrs. G and I were in a group of women at a social affair, but having a little business to talk over, we stepped into another room where we were almost immediately followed by an acquaintance. We greeted her and then went on with our conversation, from which she was excluded. I forgot her presence and when I looked her way again she was gone. We had not been kind and, to make it worse, she was comparatively a stranger among us.

In a few minutes every one was leaving, without my having had a chance to make amends in any way. I could not apologize without giving a point to the rudeness….Now I learn that it will be months before I see her again. I know that she is very sensitive and that I must have hurt her. Again and from the bottom of my heart, I prayed “The Fool’s Prayer,”

These clumsy feet, still in the mire,

Go crushing blossoms without end;

These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust

Among the heart-strings of a friend.

O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool.

As we grow old enough to have a proper perspective, we see such things work out to their conclusion….Very few of our misdeeds are with deliberate intent to do wrong. Our hearts are mostly in the right place but we seem to be weak in the head.

For Laura, even animals taught spiritual things. Her pet in the Little House series, Jack the bulldog, provided a constant example of faithfulness and courage. This is so much the case that when Jack finally dies, Laura hopes he will find a place with her in the afterlife. Pa assures her that there must be “Happy Hunting Grounds” for dogs like Jack. Laura continued to have a lifelong love of animals and attributed spiritual qualities to her dogs: the attribute of apology to one dog, who offered his paw after having mistaken a friend for a stranger, and to another dog, who was blind, the quality of wondering, Why me?

The God and Father of Us All

Laura believed there was a vital life connection between the temporal and the eternal. All truth, whether in nature or in Scripture, was God’s truth—and that truth remained basically the same from generation to generation. When the value of Christianity was questioned after the carnage of World War I, Laura defended her faith in a December 1919 Ruralist article: “Here and there one sees a criticism of Christianity because of the things that have happened and are still going on. ‘Christian civilization is a failure,’ some say. ‘Christianity has not prevented these things, therefore it is a failure,’ say others.”

But Laura went on to maintain that true Christianity among the nations hadn’t been tried at all. Christianity was known about but wasn’t practiced because it had been found difficult. People should have followed through with what Christ taught rather than give up at the first challenge brought on by the Great War.

She also noted that if we are going to fail in applying true Christian teaching to our own lives, we cannot expect to see it appear from a lawless mob, which is exactly what we are doing when we fail in our individual Christian responsibilities. Therefore, Laura insisted that we should “do the right thing always.” Just as individuals make up the whole of a nation’s culture, so do individual actions make up the moral fiber of society. In other words, do good, and that act will come back to bless you in ways you did not expect.

In her Ruralist column from June 1918 she praised a local attorney for living out the golden rule by not taking a case because he knew doing so would do irreparable harm to two neighbors. He showed that honesty is not just the best policy; it is the only policy and bears real consequences for good. The attorney in her story ended up with another case on the recommendation of the client he had persuaded not to bring suit. “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days,” says Ecclesiastes 11:1. “If there were a cry of ‘stop thief!’ we would all stand still,” Laura said in this same Ruralist column. Yet she maintained that there is still hope that we will do the right thing because Christian teaching permeates society.

In another column, Laura reflected on an argument among neighbors and saw the truth of Proverbs 15:1 lived out: “A soft answer turneth away wrath.” The wrath was turned away by the kind answers of the one toward whom the anger was directed. Having prepared for a fight, the angry party was left with nothing to say and a foolish look on her face. Mrs. Wilder commented that the angry woman “might as well have tried to break a feather pillow by beating [it]” as to start an argument in the first place. She went on to say,

Until this incident, I had found no more in the words than the idea that a soft answer might cool the wrath of an aggressor, but I saw wrath turned away as an arrow deflected from its mark and come to understand that a soft answer and a courteous manner are an actual protection.

In Laura I see a more traditional Christian ethic that says the old values being expressed—shown to us by father and mother, family and the church—are the values that can carry us forward into the future.

Rose, the Less Traditional

Yet how different were Rose’s views on the influence of religion, especially as it related to America’s essential beliefs and direction forward. In a March 2, 1933, article for the Mansfield Mirror newspaper, Rose wrote,

The symbols and even the essentials of religious belief vary from country to country and age to age while the fundamental struggle of human life against the lifeless universe [italics added] is always and everywhere the same. I wasn’t dealing with religious belief but with the more elemental struggle when I wrote about Caroline and Charles [in Let the Hurricane Roar]. And so, in fact, were the American pioneers when they went west.

The pioneers weren’t psalm-singers or quarrelers about creeds….Don’t forget that a greater part of the pioneer advance was made by Quakers and by Unitarians and Congregationalists, all of which dispensed as much as possible with religious creeds and forms. Courage isn’t a matter of religion; it’s a matter of character. And human courage has always been adequate to the demands made upon it [italics added]. Our very existence today is proof of that.

A writer expressing these views today would be labeled, more than likely, a secularist. Such sentiments are if anything more mainstream now than a more traditional view that places God at the center of existence. In post–World War I America, however, Rose’s viewpoint would have been considered at best a minority view and at worst heretical.

In contrast to Rose, Laura viewed the influence of the Christian faith as essential and not marginal. While she would not have denied that courage is a valuable character trait, I don’t believe she would have separated it from the influence of religious faith or maintained that the influence of religious faith on communities was insignificant. Yes, individuals could overlook doctrinal differences among Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Catholics—the main Christian groups that had settled the West (Unitarians and Quakers being too small in number to have had the influence Rose claimed). But religious conviction, or lack of it, shaped the whole culture of this country. Gallup polls have always shown Americans to be far more religious than other Western cultures. This was not the case without deliberate effort and evangelical intent, as Laura herself demonstrated by what she wrote.

Mama Bess Speaks Her Mind

The fact is, the importance of the influence of private faith on public morality became a theme of Mrs. Wilder’s, especially during the moral crucible of World War I. An August 1918 column made a point that I’m confident was first taught to her at her mother’s knee:

I heard a boy swear the other day, and it gave me a distinctly different kind of a shock than usual. I had just been reading an article in which our soldiers were called crusaders who were offering themselves, in their youth as a sacrifice in order that right might prevail against wrong and that those ideals, which are in effect the teachings of Christ, shall be accepted as the law of nations.

When I heard the boy use the name of Christ in an oath, I felt that he had belittled the mighty effort we are making, and that he had put an affront upon our brave soldiers by using lightly the name of the great Leader who first taught the principles for which they are dying. The boy had not thought of it in this way at all. He imagined that he was being very bold and witty, quite a grown man in fact.

I wonder how things came to be so reversed from the right order, that it should be thought daring and smart to swear, instead of being regarded as utterly foolish and a sign of weakness, betraying a lack of self-control. If people could only realize how ridiculous they appear when they call down the wrath of the Creator and Ruler of the Universe just because they have jammed their thumbs. I feel sure they would never be guilty of swearing again. It is so out of proportion, something as foolish and wasteful as it would be to use the long-range gun which bombarded Paris [Big Bertha], to shoot a fly. If we call upon the Mightiest for trivial things, upon whom or what shall we call in the great moments of life?

Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” Similarly, Laura found it best to approach her own moral pretentions lightly, even as she preached her religious views:

“You have so much tact and can get along with people so well,” said a friend to me once. Then after a thoughtful pause she added, “But I never could see any difference between tact and trickery.” Upon my assuring her that there was no difference, she pursued the subject further.

“Now I have no tact whatever, but speak plainly,” she said pridefully. “The Scotch people are, I think, the most tactful and the Scotch, you know, are the trickiest nation in the world.”

As I am of Scotch descent, I could restrain my merriment no longer and when I recovered enough to say, “You are right, I am Scotch,” she smiled ruefully and said, “I told you I had no tact.”

Tact does for life just what lubricating oil does for machinery. It makes the wheels run smoothly and without it there is a great deal of friction and the possibility of a breakdown.

I sometimes wonder if Laura occasionally thought of her own daughter in light of this sentiment. Laura was going to need a good deal of tact in the difficult waltz that was their relationship, particularly in the years between 1928 and 1935, when they lived so close together that sometimes they worked out of the same house, a house that had been all Laura’s until Rose resettled in Mansfield and moved in with her parents.

Those were heavy years of turmoil and fruitful labor.