Why Rose Wilder Lane Moved to Albania in the 1920s
Ever since I learned about Rose Wilder Lane's Albanian Experiment, I've been determined to repeat it.
First of all, welcome new subscribers from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Research Association Conference! I’ve been meaning to say that. I loved the chance to interact with everyone IRL, and you will get my Gunsmoke joke in this post more than anyone. I love you all for that.
This project explores Rose Wilder Lane’s time living in Albania from 1926 to 1928 and how that experience shaped her writing, politics, and later work with Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I mostly use this Substack for Albania zoom-ins, a fish, an Ottoman bridge, or a communist pyramid, but for a change, I want to zoom out to explain who Rose Wilder Lane was and why her Albanian Era matters.
Ahem.
Once upon a time, in a post-World War I Europe…
Rose Wilder Lane’s Move to Albania in 1926
In July 1926, American journalist, author, travel writer, and political theorist Rose Wilder Lane bought a Model T Ford and drove with her companion, Helen Boylston, from Paris, France, to Tirana, Albania, with plans to establish permanent residency.
Lane invested $2,000 in renovating their rented house. She drew architectural plans for a Moorish-style house overlooking the Adriatic Sea. Lane and Boyslton designed and planted an elaborate garden. They adopted a Maltese terrier named Mr. Bunting.
Seventeen months after her arrival, Lane received an emergency telegram from her parents. On January 27, 1928, she left Albania and returned to her childhood home in rural Missouri, where, over the next decade, she applied her determination and expertise to working with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, on writing and publishing the iconic “Little House” books, one of the most important literary collaborations of the 21st century.
From Little House on the Prairie to Albania
I came to Rose Wilder Lane through the mother whose telegram called Lane back to Missouri, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like many, I grew up idolizing Laura Ingalls (the character and the author), obsessively reading the series that details her fictionalized pioneer coming of age many times over.
In my research for my first book, My Life is Laura (2011), I learned that Wilder’s daughter was the more significant writer in her day, a well-known literary journalist, novelist, short story writer, and biographer of figures such as Jack London and Herbert Hoover.
While controversial at first — as Lane herself was highly invested in crafting her mother’s brand of quaint farmwoman/secret literary genius — Lane’s role as collaborator, co-author, and editor is now accepted (I’m working on it, okay?), as more researchers have confirmed this relationship through correspondence and annotated drafts.
The more I learned about Lane, the more I became fascinated by her genius and her ambition. She taught herself telegraphy, using that skill to leapfrog from her small Missouri hometown of Mansfield to Kansas City to San Francisco, where she turned to writing and real estate as more prestigious and profitable careers.
Why Albania?
After World War I, Lane moved to Europe to work as a foreign correspondent for the Red Cross. There, she met Helen Boylston while travelling on the Orient Express to Warsaw, and they hatched their Albanian scheme.
The second I learned about Rose’s Albanian Era, I was plagued with questions, as if a toddler had co-opted my brain: Why did Lane dream of a life in Albania? And why, after going to such lengths to move there, abandon the dream less than two years later, only to move back to square one: the small, rural farming town she had always claimed to loathe? (The telegraph that called her back no longer exists.) What happened to her relationship with Helen Boylston? What is Albania like now versus 100 years ago?
Wait, where is Albania?
Retracing Lane’s Journey in Modern Albania
These questions simmered in the back burner of my mind for over a decade. I applied for the Fulbright to Albania in 2022. When I didn’t receive it, I decided life is short and bought a plane ticket to Tirana. I spent a month in Albania, and returned for a two-week trip this past May.
In 1923, Lane crossed the Albanian mountains by horseback, an adventure she wrote about and published in her best-selling book called The Peaks of Shala. I retraced a portion of Lane’s trek through the Albanian mountains, where I found the Albanian mountains unchanged, and vestiges of the culture Lane encountered still in place. The Theth church she visited remains, as does the Ottoman Mesi Bridge in Shkodër.
The Search for Rose Wilder Lane’s House in Tirana
My search for Lane’s “little house” (it was actually quite large) in Tirana has proven more complicated. Over the past 100 years, the city has undergone an intense evolution from a small Ottoman city of 17,000 to an international metropolis of over 758,000.
The city has been through:
Italian fascist takeover
Nazi takeover
46-year communist regime
The race to westernize
Today, skyscrapers rise like fast-growing asparagus, overshadowing whatever vestiges of the Ottoman empire remain. I located a 1921 map of Tirana and determined the approximate location of Rose’s house, only to arrive and find a palimpsest of architecture and abandoned gardens bordered by chain link fences.
Another challenge has been how the communist regime systematically destroyed universities, books, libraries, and records. Access to primary materials in Albania has been, so far, a tough road. The good news is that Lane kept an extensive journal that she called “My Albanian Garden” and wrote sheaves of letters, archived at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.
Why Rose Wilder Lane’s Albanian Era Matters Now
The conversation surrounding Laura Ingalls Wilder has undergone a sea change since I published my first book. In 2017, Caroline Fraser published her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser reveals the darker side of the Ingalls family, a narrative that contradicts the romantic version we superfans love.
In 2018, a book division of the American Library Association voted to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from its major children's literature award over concerns about how the author referred to Indigenous People and Black Americans.
Over a decade later from my first book, which views my heroine through a lens of nostalgia, it seems fitting I would seek to understand the complicated, often aggravating, genius of Laura’s daughter. Lane embodies a hornet’s nest of American ideologies, both left and right, buzzing around in one body. Her letters can be so vehement they combust like the opening credits for Gunsmoke.
Mercurial doesn’t begin to describe Lane. She was visionary and philistine, generous and penurious, world-traveled and provincial, and she’s had considerable influence on American literary and political thought.
But what if she’d stayed with Helen Boylston and Mr. Bunting in Albania?
(For indexing!) This essay introduces my ongoing research into Rose Wilder Lane’s time in Albania and its place in American literary and political history.
Was the emergency Laura or Almanzo’s health?