Stone Cold Rose Wilder

Slate’s posted a letter that Rose Wilder Lane wrote to her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder after reading the first draft of By the Shores of Silver Lake, and although I was vaguely aware that Rose Wilder was a hardass whose outlook on civil society I will never ever share (she may be credited with the current use of “libertarian”), this note is really a marvel:

You have the brief scene in which Laura threatens to kill Charley with a knife, but that has to be cut out. A 12-year-old girl whose cousin wants to kiss her does not normally threaten him with a nice; she laughs and kisses him, he’s her cousin. Or if she’s shy and doesn’t like him she just escapes, and the incident is not important enough to mention. […] You cannot have [your character] acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight. Maybe you did it, but you can not do it in fiction; you can not make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book.

She follows that up with this:

I remember when I was five years old or so, and Mrs. Boast let those hoodlums take me home, I ran away from a hulking big brute who tried to kiss me, and his motive was pure sex sadism which I recognized well enough without knowing at all what it was. I suppose something of that kind was in this incident. But it is not child’s book stuff.

Whether she edited the Little House series or ghostwrote them completely, Rose knew what she was doing in terms of this “child’s book stuff,” but damnnnn. [Slate]