These Happy Golden Years
Laura Ingalls is fifteen and begins taking teaching posts to earn money so her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind.
About
These Happy Golden Years is an autobiographical children's novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in 1943 as the eighth of the nine Little House books. It covers the years from 1882 to 1885, when Laura was fifteen to eighteen, and it is built on the two things that ended her adolescence: teaching and marriage.
Laura takes a post at a settlement school twelve miles from De Smet, boards with a family she dislikes, and spends her weekends travelling back to town, where Almanzo Wilder drives her home. The money she earns is meant to keep her sister Mary at the college for the blind in Iowa, and the housekeeping, church going and school terms of a small prairie town fill the middle of the book.
Wilder wrote the series as a true account of her own childhood and youth, and this is the volume that leaves it: the courtship is long and practical, held together by sleigh rides and a claim on land, and the book ends with a wedding.
Book details
- Author
- Laura Ingalls Wilder
- First published
- 1943
- Series
- Little House, book 8
- Subgenre
- Frontier fiction, Family saga, Coming-of-age
- Primary genre
- Historical Fiction
- Tags
- No tags for this book.
- Reading order
- Also on this shelf: Little House in the Big Woods (book 1), Little House on the Prairie (book 2), Farmer Boy (book 2), On the Banks of Plum Creek (book 4), By the Shores of Silver Lake (book 5), The Long Winter (book 6), Little Town on the Prairie (book 7), The First Four Years (book 9)
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