16. Laura Ingalls Wilder - West From Home

I’m sad to have come to the end of Laura’s writing but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this last selection. West From Home is a collection of letters, discovered and published after the deaths of both Laura and her daughter, Rose, which Laura wrote to Almanzo while visiting Rose in San Francisco. It was an exciting time. The completion of the Panama Canal was being celebrated by ‘The Panama-Pacific International Exposition’, there was war in Europe, electricity and motor cars were in evidence and Laura was just beginning, under Rose’s tutelage, to write and earn money by doing so. It was lovely to meet this happier, adult Laura after the travail of The First Four Years and On the Way Home.

I’m not torn between reading Rose’s story as written by her Executor, Roger Lea MacBride (who edited West From Home), investigating a series of books captioned ‘The Caroline Years’ which I assume contain something of Laura’s mother’s story, or moving into other biography of the Ingalls family and history of their times.