the unvarnished truth

I see in the Daily Telegraph that Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiography is to be published this autumn.  It will be the unvarnished version as originally written, which failed to find a publisher until reworked into the series of children's books many of us know and love.  And then the TV series, though I quibble with the Telegraph's headline use of the phrase 'much loved' if intended to cover the telly version as well as the books.  I loved the books.  The TV series Little House on the Prairie was an abomination.

Apparently life in the mid-West as a pioneer in the 1870s was not so squeaky clean as the books made out.  That's not really a surprise.  After all, they were written for children, and I don't know if even now Jacqueline Wilson would include a drunk setting his bedroom on fire and dragging his wife around by her hair.  Perhaps she would.  I know my mother finds my niece's enthusiasm for Jacqueline Wilson over Geoffrey Trease rather depressing.

The thing I particularly liked about the children's books was not Laura's feud with Nellie Olsen, so much as the detailed descriptions of how you did stuff.  After reading Little House in the Big Woods I felt I too could have moulded and trimmed my own rifle bullets, or tapped a sugar maple.  By the time the family were half way to Dakota I'd cracked building a log cabin, and the dangers of fire damp when digging a well.  More than forty years later I have yet to put any of these purely theoretical skills to the test, but I still like the idea that I know how to tap a maple tree or how to retrieve a horse and sled that have fallen through thick snow lying on prairie grass.  Nobody ever dared me to lick a pump handle while I was growing up, but I'd have known not to do it during a winter freeze if they had.

I guess I will read A Pioneer Girl.  I am curious to hear the grown-up version of life as a farming family travelling West as the West was opening up, and fond enough of the Ingalls clan to risk hearing something closer to the truth.  It can be a sad disappointment, though, reading about the private lives of writers whose books you have loved.  So many of them are not very nice, authors of beautiful and lyrical books turning out to be selfish and manipulative characters you wouldn't want as a friend in the real world.  The review of A Pioneer Girl says that Pa was not always the scrupulous character he is made out to be in the children's version of the books.  Suppose Laura Ingalls Wilder turns out to be a right cow?