Hear me whisper, hear me roar: Life writing, literature for children, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

While women's life writings have always been powerful and vibrant works, they have now gained recognition and are being acknowledged as such. Life writing has challenged the narrow definitions of autobiography that have kept so many women's stories from being acknowledged and recognized and they also provide voice to many who have long been silenced. By giving voice and respect to a whole new range of experiences, we empower these stories that demonstrate agency. The critics who examine and celebrate these writings amplify the writers' voices and have, in the last decades, built a new genre and opened up what had been a very exclusive genre.;Life writings have not played much of a role within children's literature to date, but bringing children's literature, or any other new work or voice, into the discourse of life writing is important not only for the perspective, but also in that also in that it works to keep redefining the boundaries of the field. Children's voices are not so much lost as overlooked, but they still need to be heard.;Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books provide an excellent place to start such an exploration, and admirably demonstrate how beneficial a meshing of life writing and children's literature can be. Wilder's writings are extraordinarily popular within children's literature, but are not recognized as life writings, and are usually shelved as historical fiction rather than as any type of autobiographical writing. Bringing these works into contact with the theories of life writing reveals them to be far more powerful and complex than they are usually seen as, and also adds a new perspective into the discourses surrounding life writing.