Since Rose was a respected journalist and author in her own right and knew publishers in New York City, she became half of the Wilder/Lane book production team. Laura wrote her memories of frontier life, trying to include elements Rose recommended. Rose then typed the manuscripts, editing, rewriting and making changes she thought necessary. She then brought the manuscripts to her publisher contacts and went over further revisions with her mother before publication. It was after a few decades in Missouri that Wilder and Lane began preaching the libertarian gospel of not needing government programs such as farm subsidies or Social Security. Wilder insisted all anyone needed was determination and five acres, while ignoring that her family had 40, and the couple always had second and third jobs.ĭespite their off-the-farm jobs, the Great Depression hit the Wilders hard and Rose's suggestion of selling Laura's pioneer memories as children's literature found a receptive audience.
Wilder would start teaching at country schools at 16. At 18, she married Almanzo Wilder and the young couple in their first years endured a house fire and the loss of their second child as an infant, all the while deep in debt. When their daughter was three, her parents contracted diphtheria, causing Almanzo to have a stroke that permanently impaired him and prompted them to move to southern Missouri in 1894. The Ingalls family would suffer two grasshopper plagues that would take out two years of crops, their oldest daughter becoming seriously ill and then becoming blind, and enduring the brutal winter of 1880-81 in De Smet, South Dakota, where the town's residents almost starved to death. It's not clear why the editors of the book tied Mary's blindness to scarlet fever, but one possibility is that the disease was such a well-known and feared scourge at the time, the researchers suggest.įollow LiveScience on Twitter. "It could also lead to inflammation of the optic nerve that would result in a slow and progressive loss of sight."
"Meningoencephalitis could explain Mary's symptoms, including the inflammation of the facial nerve that left the side of her face temporarily paralyzed," Tarini said in a statement. Those symptoms were more consistent with a disease called meningoencephalitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord and brain, which can result from several viruses. They found that Wilder described her sister's disease as a "spinal sickness" and that local newspaper reports said a "hemorrhage of the brain had set in one side of her face became partially paralyzed." To find out what caused Mary's blindness, Tarini and her colleagues investigated local newspapers, the author's memoirs and letters.
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