You have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were

“Often, if you want to write about women in history,” the novelist Hilary Mantel has said, “you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.” But when it comes to Wilder, we don’t have to pretend. 

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That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier. But the Ingallses were not people of power or wealth. Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind.

C. Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2016), 5 and 28