great woman and a great soul. Contemporary “womennwriters” and their ideological touts seem hardly aware thatnshe existed.nThere is a completeness, both human and historical, innher vision, and she achieves it by establishing, at the verynstart of her long enterprise, its central intelligence. From thenfirst sentence of her book, the story—insistently but unobtrusively—nis Laura’s story, seen through her eyes and toldnfrom her own point of view. (There are five departures fromnthis method, all of them in The Long Winter, where Mrs.nWilder makes Pa and Almanzo, respectively, the governingnconsciousness of the narrative.) And while all of herncharacters change noticeably with the years (Pa becomingnsomewhat worn by time, hard luck, and the thwarted desirento move farther west; Mary in her priggishness growingnself-aware; Carrie growing up), it is the development ofnLaura’s personality that is to the front. On page 85 oi BignWoods, we are allowed the first glimpse of what is bothndistinctive of, and essential to, that personality when Laura,nstudying the pictures in the family Bible, asks her mothernwhether Adam had good clothes to wear on Sunday and isntold no, “Toor Adam, all he had to wear was skins.'” Tonwhich the author adds, “Laura did not pity Adam. Shenwished she had nothing to wear but skins.” With those twonbrief sentences, Mrs. Wilder skillfully begins to establish thenpolarity between the two sisters: the older blonde, “civilized,”ndocile, patient, a homebody, and “good”; the youngernbrown-haired, “wild,” headstrong, an out-of-doors tomboy,nand “naughty.” In them also is the germ that will growninto the special relationship between Laura and her father,nwhose daughter she truly was (restless, adventurous, full ofnempathy for wild creatures and for all of the natural world),nand the identification of Mary as her mother’s child (gentle,nnot wishing to be “dragged from pillar to post,” for whomnnature is something more to be endured and, if possible,navoided than appreciated). “‘We’re across the Mississippi!’n[Pa] said, hugging [Laura] joyously. ‘How do you like that,nlittle half-pint of sweet cider half drunk up? Do you likengoing out west where Indians live?'”nLittle House in the Big Woods is an idyll, a portrait of ansparely comfortable life in what was no longer quitenwilderness, cut short by the westering impulse. “Wildnanimals would not stay in a country where there were sonmany people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked ancountry where the wild animals lived without being afraid.”n(With the contradictoriness, or doublemindedness, of thenfrontiersman, he had welcomed enthusiastically the threshingnmachine that processed his wheat crop in Wisconsin:n” ‘Other folks can stick to the old-fashioned ways if theynwant to, but I’m all for progress. It’s a great age we’re livingnin.'”) Little House on the Prairie, while not exactly an idylln(Mrs. Wilder does not tell just how closely the Ingalls camento being scalped on the Verdigris), is nevertheless in somenways the most lyric of all her books; certainly it describesnwhat the author must in hindsight have recognized as thenapex of her family’s experience of the frontier. Thenlong-grass prairies beyond the Mississippi are Laura’s firstnsight of the true West, to which she responds with anninstinctive enthusiasm. “Kansas was an endless flat landncovered with tall grass blowing in the wind. Day after daynthey traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but the ripplingn22/CHRONICLESnnngrass and the enormous sky. In a perfect circle the skyncurved down to the level land, and the wagon was in thencircle’s exact middle. . . . When the sun went down, thencircle was still around them and the edge of the sky was pink.nThen slowly the land became black. The wind made anlonely sound in the grass. The camp fire was small and lostnin so much space. But large stars hung from the sky,nglittering so near that Laura felt she could almost touchnthem.”nLittle House on the Prairie ends as it began, in a wagonnbox: “Once more the covered wagon was home.” Like itsnpredecessor, the book encompasses a year’s time — laternones expand to cover, several—but the paragraphing, sentencenstructure, syntax, and comprehension are advanced inncomplexity by a degree of two. Some of the most beautifulnpassages Laura Wilder ever wrote (Mr. Edwards fromnTennessee dancing in the moonlight before the unfinishednhouse to the music of Pa’s fiddle, the Indian jamboree, thenIndians riding away in file into the West) are to be found innLittle House on the Prairie. Here, the American myth ofnhuman freedom in an empty and untrammeled land isnalmost realized, however briefly, but without sacrifice ofngentility as it is symbolized by Ma’s shepardess, “the littlenchina woman [who] had come all the way and had not beennbroken” and who, from the mantlepiece of the newlynfinished log house, presides over a hearth that is thenrepresentation of a balance achieved between man andnnature, wilderness and civilization..nTwice in this book, at the beginning and at the end asnthe family is preparing to drive away from the housenahead of the oncoming soldiers. Pa assures Ma, “We have allnthe time there is.” In fact, time — free time, frontierntime — was already running out for the Ingalls. On thenBanks of Plum Creek describes Charles Ingalls’ attempt atnremaining a free man of the soil, independent, selfsufficient,ndependent on nobody in the new Eden that is bynno means, however, any longer a wilderness. That it is not anwilderness indeed is the principal reason for the family’snsettiing near Walnut Grove, Caroline having insisted forciblynthat it is time for the girls to begin their formalneducation. The new house Pa builds is only four miles fromntown (in Kansas the nearest setflement had been Independence,nMissouri, forty miles away); and though it is an”wonderful house,” made partly from boughten parts andnwith a new patented stove in it, its construction is treated bynMrs. Wilder far less poetically than the raising of the logncabin on the Verdigris was. Unlike the original, moreover,nthis Eden reveals itself in onslaughts of fire and ice,ndroughts, and plagues of grasshoppers that destroy the wheatncrops and put the Ingalls perennially in debt. Until this pointnin her writing, Mrs. Wilder has emphasized the beauty ofnnature and the harmony in which man can live with thennatural world; now, by means of the episode in which Lauranfalls into the freshet-swollen creek, she personalizes thenfamily’s experience in Minnesota while replacing the sentimentalnview of nature proper to a very young child with thentougher-minded idea appropriate to an older girl. “In thatnvery instant, she knew the creek was not playing. It wasnstrong and terrible. … It would not care.” And then Lauranlearns another lesson. “But the creek had not got to her. Itn