February 8, 2007 @ 5:49 pm | Filed under: Little House
…to talk about Little House. Many of you have written to ask when my next Martha or Charlotte book will be published. Plans have been in flux for over a year now, but it’s time to address your questions.
As I mentioned here recently, HarperCollins has launched new paperback editions of Laura’s books which feature photographic covers and no longer contain the Garth Williams illustrations. (The Garth Williams art will remain in the hardcover editions and the colorized paperback editions.)
There are also going to be some changes in the other Little House series. The Martha, Charlotte, Caroline, and Rose books are being reissued in abridged editions. If you wish to read these books in their original,
complete forms, you’ll want to pick them up now before the unabridged editions go out of print. In at least one case (On Top of Concord Hill, a Caroline book), the original is already out of print and is hard to find.
(A reader recently told me copies are selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay.)
The abridged editions of my books and the Caroline and Rose books will be released with new covers this summer. They are significantly shorter; in some cases more than a hundred pages have been cut from the original edition.
In light of these changes, I have decided not to continue writing Martha and Charlotte books. Although it is indeed strange to know that I will not tell the rest of their stories (especially the story of Martha and Lew’s romance, for which I have been sowing seeds since the first books), I do not think it is such a bad thing to end my part of the story with Beyond the Heather Hills and Across the Puddingstone Dam.
In both of those books, I had the opportunity to say something about what is good and true and enduring in this world. Martha glimpsed it, looking into the eyes of her infant niece. Charlotte glimpsed it in the
eyes of her mother, the grown-up Martha, who endured the worst kind of loss but, through faith, managed to keep hold of—and share—her joy.
It will be difficult to say goodbye to these girls who have been to me like my own children. I have loved watching them grow. I am deeply honored to have had the opportunity to, in the words of Gail Godwin, “respectfully imagine” them and chronicle their stories.
As I said, my decision to leave the series has been in the works for quite some time. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on new projects and am quite excited about my current novel, which is about neither a Scottish lass nor a New England villager, but something completely different. Stay tuned…
Charlotte Tucker, children's books, HarperCollins, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House, Martha Morse
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