Welcome to Albaniac!
In 1926 Rose Wilder Lane—journalist, writer, and daughter of the not-yet-iconic Laura Ingalls Wilder—moved to Albania. In 2024, I came to Albania, too. The travelogue begins here.
What is Albaniac?
In August 1926, Rose Wilder Lane—journalist, writer, and daughter of the not-yet-iconic children's author Laura Ingalls Wilder—moved to Albania with traveling companion Helen Boylston.
Seventeen months later Lane received a telegram from her parents. On January 27, 1928, she left Albania rural Missouri where she applied her determination and expertise to helping her mother write and publish the iconic “Little House” books.
That era of Lane's life and her role in creating the books had been well-covered by other historians, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Caroline Frasier.
But let’s go back to Albania. Rose loved Albania so much that when she came down with malaria wrote that “even the malaria in Albania is superb.” Why would a world adventurer such as Rose ever move back to her rural hometown she claimed to have loathed for so many years?
This newsletter is part travelogue, part history, and part memoir as I seek the answer to this question, and explore modern-day Albania on my own.
Why Albaniac?
Once upon a time, I wrote a memoir, My Life Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. While researching this book I became fascinated about Lane’s time in Albania. Where was Albania, anyway? And why had I never heard of this place before except for this song from Cheers?
For fifteen years I’ve wanted to go to Albania and research this period in Lane’s life, Now I finally am.
I have some unfinished business with my first book regarding what’s happened to me in those fifteen (WHAT) years and the cultural sea change regarding attitudes towards Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work. Laura’s complicated daughter seems like the better foil for these modern times.
Why you belong here
Because Albania seems cool.
Because it seems pretty cool that a woman in her late thirties moved to Albania in 1926.
Because you're one of those Laura people who would read a story about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s shiny tin cup written from the point of view of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s shiny tin cup if someone wrote it.
Because you’re interested in musing about books and travel and writing.
I am such a RWL fan. Probably because I am a docent at the Wilder Homes and Museum in Mansfield, MO. I have the privilege of showing and telling visitors about Rose coming back to Mansfield and building her parents a wonderful "retirement" home on their property. I am looking forward to your "Albaniac" book. And please come visit us. ...Marie