The life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the acclaimed and much-loved Little House juvenile book series, has maintained its fascination within both popular culture and scholarly research since her passing in 1957. Continuing sales of the books themselves; the ongoing availability of the syndicated television series Little House on the Prairie; the proliferation of museums, monuments, and websites dedicated to her life; and even the launch of a Laurapalooza conference (held every 2–3 years since 2010) all confirm her vast appeal. More than a dozen biographies have been written about her, emphasizing different elements of her life, her worldview, her family, and her legacy.
With A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, John J. Fry enters this conversation, examining the significance of religion to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Specifically, Fry’s stated objective is to consider how Laura engaged religious doctrine, experiences with the transcendent, religion and identity, and religious practice. Through a meticulous consideration of sources including the Little House books, articles Laura wrote for the Missouri Ruralist biweekly farm newspaper, her memoir Pioneer Girl, and travel diaries and letters, Fry is able to draw the straightforward conclusion that while religion was important to Laura, it was not central to her life. Fry’s work serves as a sensitive corrective to the culturally pervasive idea (particularly promoted through the television series, as Fry points out) that religion was a more powerful force for Laura and her family.
The book is organized chronologically and thematically, beginning with Laura’s early life in Kansas and Wisconsin, then tracing the family’s many moves and corresponding important life events. Fry finds little mention of the church, Christianity, or religion in Laura’s writings about her early childhood. In Wisconsin, the family did not attend a church but did follow the traditional Christian observance of Sunday as a day of rest and quiet. When the family moved to Walnut Grove, Minnesota when Laura was seven, her parents did help to fund a church, the Union Congregational Church of Christ, and she attended Sunday school there, but again, religion was not a central part of her life. After a brief sojourn to Iowa, the family returned to Walnut Grove. During the next two years, Laura’s memoir pays more attention to religion, describing church excursions, Sunday school, services, revivals, and even recounting a transcendent experience. Fry finds that during these years Laura was internalizing Christian values and that this may have been the time of her life where Christianity played the most central role.
The book next assesses the years of Laura’s courtship with Almanzo Wilder, their subsequent marriage, parenthood, and Laura’s blossoming career as a writer. Over the course of her adult life, Laura continued to attend church fairly regularly and participated in church activities in several of the communities where she and Almanzo resided. For the Missouri Ruralist, she occasionally wrote poems and articles that engaged themes relating to general Christian morality, but most of her submissions were not religious. She never became an official member of any church. She and Almanzo both, however, became members of the Order of the Eastern Star, and Laura held leadership roles in this organization for many years.
Later chapters of the book examine Laura’s collaboration with her daughter Rose on the Little House books after publishers repeatedly declined to publish Laura’s memoir, Pioneer Girl. From his detailed comparison of Laura’s original drafts of each book in the series, to Rose’s edited versions and the final publications, Fry concludes that Rose both added and removed religious content. Yet Laura’s depictions of religion in her original drafts are consistent with her memoir and other writings in terms of her level of engagement with religion throughout her life.
Examining Laura’s final years, Fry determines that her consideration of religion continued much as it had throughout her life – she prayed, attended church, and enjoyed reading the Bible, but did not deeply engage religious doctrine.
A Prairie Faith will be interesting and valuable to the wide audience of Laura Ingalls Wilder fans. Fry’s clear organizational structure, balanced evaluation of the sources, and consistent connection back to his argument strengthen his conclusions. Fry also provides important context about rural life, homesteading, and the development of individual towns and congregations. For readers less familiar with women’s religious history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his study could be strengthened by considering Laura’s religious experiences more specifically within that context. To what extent were Laura’s experiences, beliefs, and practices representative of women in her region, era, and religious affiliation? Which of her choices, such as not joining a church, or not participating more fully in church activities, might have been less representative, and what might have been the implications? In his conclusion, Fry writes that Laura’s experience with religion “set her apart from the more conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals of the early twentieth century” but that she was also “not a liberal or a modernist.” (196) Deeper explanations throughout the book of how her experiences fit between these two ends of the religious spectrum, compared to other women, would further enrich our understanding of Laura’s religious life.
Overall, A Prairie Faith offers a well-supported and thought-provoking perspective on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s religious life and is an excellent addition to the robust and flourishing larger study of her life and times.
