Sister Lit

Earlier today I posted a review of Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake, the fifth book in the Little House series. And one that I always forget how much I love until I read it again.

As I was writing, I found myself thinking about the way Laura and Mary's relationship shapes the narrative. This is the book in which we discover that Mary has become blind, the consequence of scarlet fever. It's also the book where Pa tells Laura, more than once, that she needs to "become Mary's eyes." And so Laura, ever dutiful, truly takes that task on. She describes everything she sees out there on the Dakota prairie to her sister, often in incredible detail.

As the sweet girl and I were reading the book through, we talked about that -- about the way in which Laura learned to describe things vividly and with such care. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the real-life experience of being a companion to her blind sister probably helped to shape the kind of writer that Wilder became, the writer who loves to pour on detail after detail so that we "see" right along with her.

The Laura-Mary relationship of Little House has always been one of the cores of the series for me. It colors so much, from the way Laura compares her own mischievous behavior to Mary's ladylike behavior when they're little girls, to the ways in which Laura tends to ally herself with Pa's adventurous wandering spirit over against the gentler, more domestic instincts of Ma and Mary, right down through their deepening friendship as Laura "becomes her eyes" and later works hard as a school-teacher to help provide Mary the opportunity to study in a special college. I've often felt that Mary's patient forbearance always seemed almost too good to be true, and wondered if Laura didn't overly-sentimentalize this portrait of her sister...though maybe not. Maybe Mary really did have those deeply-engrained virtues. And certainly Laura's loving respect for this sister, so different from her herself, shines through.

I'd never made the connection until this evening, but it struck me that the Laura-Mary relationship has a prelude in the Jo-Beth relationship of Little Women (with perhaps a dash of the Jo-Amy relationship sprinkled into the earlier books). Beth too suffered through scarlet fever, and though it didn't leave her blind, it left her heart so weak she became an invalid. Beth too is portrayed, far more than Mary even, as a real saint, especially in the midst of such suffering. Her loss is the turning point in Jo's character development and story. And of course, like Wilder's stories, Alcott's were based on her real family and growing up years, with her sister portraits based on her real sisters.

Sister literature is powerful, isn't it? Austen delved deeply into it too, though her stories were much less overtly autobiographical. But Jane too had a sister she loved deeply, Cassandra, and I've sometimes wondered how much of their relationship seeped into the storied relationships of Elizabeth-Jane and Elinor-Marianne. So many people see romance as the beating heart of every Austen novel, but to me, it often seems as those the sister relationships are the real core, especially in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

When you contemplate sister lit, what fictional sister pairings come to mind for you?