The Mousewife

by Rumer Godden, William Pène du Bois (Illustrator)

Day in and day out the dutiful mousewife works alongside her mousehusband in the house of Miss Barbara Wilkinson. It is a nice house and the mousewife is for the most part happy collecting crumbs and preparing a nest for her future mouse-babies—yet she yearns for something more. But what? Her husband, for one, can’t imagine. “I think about cheese,” he advises her. “Why don’t you think about cheese?”

Then an odd and exotic new creature, a turtledove, is brought into the house and placed in a gilded cage. A friendship develops as the dove tells the mousewife about things no house mouse has ever imagined, blue skies, tumbling clouds, tall trees, and far horizons, the memory of which haunt the dove in her captivity. The dove’s tales fill the mousewife with wonder and inspire her to take daring action.

Rumer Godden’s lovely fable about unexpected friendship and bittersweet love was inspired by a story Dorothy Wordsworth wrote for her brother, William, and is accompanied by stunning pen-and-ink drawings by William Pène du Bois.

Genres: Fiction, Childrens, Picture Books, Animals, Classics, Fantasy, Juvenile

56 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951.
A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

An all-ages fable that I adored when I was a child. Glad to find I still respect and am moved by it. I love the bits of humor in this short story which is already rich in both melancholy and joy. Of course I also love the illustrations: Godden and du Bois are both great. Anybody who cages a wild animal after seeing the picture of the dove trying to show the mousewife what it means to fly (p. 22 this edition) has no soul.

I recommend you read this aloud to your family or pets early this coming spring.

Edit: I've been reading some more by Godden, and realizing why I have mixed feelings about her different works. She's always [L]iterary, but sometimes more successfully than at other times. This is a successful one. It is not too difficult for children, but it is nonetheless rich enough for rereads. And I am of the opinion that deep rereading is a very good thing.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

My heart is happy because this little book came in the mail today! I read this book years ago during a time in my life where I felt a lot like this yearning mousewife who wanted more. So this book is very near and dear to me, if you are a day dreamer you would relate to this book. I recently got a little mouse tattoo to carry this story with me wherever I go.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The mousewife is a dutiful homemaker, who tends to her family, but finds herself longing for something more. When the boy of the house captures a turtledove, and the woman of the house keeps it in a cave, she encounters something from the wild world outside the house. At first the dove will not acknowledge her, but soon looks forward to the visits from the little mouse. The dove talks about the beauty of the outside world, the joy of flying, and the way the world looks from high in the sky. The mousewife listens, enraptured by the images and new ideas the bird brings, and she returns more and more often. Finally her visits are discovered and anger her husband, she must choose between duty to family and the stories of freedom and new perspective she has come to love. She discovers a deep empathy for the caged bird and in a brave, impulsive action she sets the turtledove free. Now she looks out the window and realizes “I can see for myself.”
The thought provoking story contains many messages, including the desire in each of us to reach for something higher, responsibility, freedom, longing, new vision, the nurturing of womanhood, love as complete unselfishness, and many more. I found this a touching book, that spoke to the place inside me that longs for something more, for someone who sees the world as I see it, and that it may be in letting go of what I want most to be able to freely, lovingly, give what someone else wants most, I can really see with a deeper and far more satisfying eye of understanding.

[Julie Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply wonderful story, beautifully illustrated.

[Ms. B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite a chapter book, not quite a picture book; this 48 page children's book (or short story) is about the friendship/partnership between a mouse who wants more and a caged dove who knows there is more. The dove seems to be fasting. What will you see as the theme and/or moral of this story?
Part of the New York Review Children's Collection.

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely thoughtful book. In some ways it anticipates the animals we meet in The Cricket in Times Square or Abel's Island or some of Randall Jarrell's books.

[Wanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

17 FEB 2020 - cover love!

19 FEB 2020 - Mrs Mousewife learned to love where she was. She yearned to experience the world outside her window. The turtledove was willing to help her experience life outside the window. But, Mrs Mousewife knew and understood that sometimes life is best exactly where you are.

I, myself, have wanted to experience life beyond my window and like Mrs Mousewife, I have contented myself with my life exactly as it has presented itself to me.

Be Happy Where You Are.

[Terris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very sweet :)

[Astrid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sparse and powerful, both in words and illustration.

[Caren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love the New York Review Children's Collection, which is in the process of reissuing out-of-print children's classics. "The Mousewife" is one of their reissues. First of all, Rumer Godden is just a wonderful author. (When I was a child, I was enthralled by her "Miss Happiness and Miss Flower".)"Mousewife" is a simple little story, but with sophisticated emotional undertones. The little mousewife is quite ordinary, except that she longs for something more, something even she cannot articulate. Her boorish mousehusband is clueless and quite lazy. You have to wonder if Ms. Godden, having been abandoned by her husband in India, with two small children to support, is making a statement about husbands....Quite by accident, the mousewife discovers a caged dove and befriends it. In some sense, her own feeling of being caged is reflected in the dove's situation. I won't spoil the ending by speaking further of the plot. This book, like the best children's books, can be read on many levels and enjoyed by different ages, which is, of course, why it is a classic. (The illustrations were done by William Pene du Bois and are classic in their own right.)

[Eleanor Toland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though it's published by The New York Review Children's Collection, The Mousewife feels far more like a fable for adults than a children's fantasy. The slim volume contains child-unfriendly material such as allegorical adultery and real domestic violence. More importantly, the story contains powerful undercurrents of melancholy, ennui and sensucht, emotions associated with age and regret.

At surface value, The Mousewife is a very simple, very powerful story. A female mouse finds her life unfulfilling and yearns for something more. She doesn't quite know what exactly the something more she wants is, but she knows that she's not complete without it. The story is about how she finds that thing, the price she pays for finding it and how it changes her. Like all the best fairy tales, The Mousewife perfectly balances the bitter and the sweet. A pensive story illustrated in moody charcoal by William Pene du Bois.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you ever feel like life goes around in a loop (feed people, drive to work, work, drive home, feed people, sleep, repeat) and sometimes feel compelled to stop and deliberately create something outside of your day-to-day activities? Ever so often I do, so I can relate to the mousewife who, "...did no know what it was that she wanted, but she wanted more."

Her wanting doesn't interfere with her life like it did for Madame Bovary. She expands her small universe and is able to continue to care for the people already in it.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, the only Rumer Godden book I've actually enjoyed from beginning to end. (Usually I enjoy about the first 7/8ths of one of her books.)

[Chrystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of these New York Review Children's Collections. The bindings are gorgeous and the illustrations are exceptional. The Mousewife was taken from a story found in Dorothy Wordsworth's diary; Godden changed the ending but kept the main gist. The Mousewife has lived inside all her life, but learns about the outdoors from a dove that is caught and put in a cage. The story is permeated by moonlight, shadows, and quietness. A gentle story about the yearnings of the soul.

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A cage would never do for one made to fly...", truer words have never been written! What a fantastic story about unforeseen friendship and bittersweet affection. The story is about a house-bound mouse who unexpectedly meets a caged dove. The mousewife is bored with her everyday routine caring for her mousehusband and has an appetite that cheese could never satisfy. She meets a dove who was captured and trapped. The dove's tales fill the mousewife with wonder and she is fascinated immediately. She learns about the world outside and aches for something more. Blue skies! Tall trees! Far horizons! I adored this story which offers a new perception on freedom, longing and love. Children and adults of all ages will embrace this story which can be read on many different levels and deem it a true classic.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this in a second-hand bookstore in London and literally felt like it was calling out to me. I read it in the middle of a London park, while my husband snoozed next to me on the grass. Perhaps it was the setting, but I absolutely adored the story and really related to it. Here is to all the mousewives who know what it is to fly!

[Melody · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a lovely story this is. I picked it up on the strength of the cover illustration, and oh, how glad I am that I did so. On the face of it, it's about a mouse who befriends a caged dove- but there are layers upon layers here, about one's role in life, and what's important. I adored it.

[RH Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful and well-illustrated, I was happy when Freddie brought this title over to me. We sat down and read it, and although she wandered away to play before we finished, I enjoyed the conclusion of the story. Kind of a Bridges of Madison County for rodents.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is there a small girl in the world who could resist this tiny story of bravery and adventure? Godden paints the story like a miniature on ivory - every brushstroke tells. Adrienne Adams' illustrations pair perfectly with the text. A gem of a book!

[Chris Derby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful illustrations

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But once there was a little mousewife who was different from the rest.” …”’What more do you want?’ asked her husband. She did not know what it was she wanted, but she wanted more.”


This 1951 book (basically a prequel to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique!) is about a discontented mousewife and what she discovers about the world and herself when the spinster lady whose house she lives in adopts a caged dove. The husband, who is prone to indigestion that doesn’t allow him to gather the crumbs the mousewife depends on, just asks her: “I think about cheese… Why don’t you think about cheese?” But she longs for something she can’t explain and follows an instinct to listen to the stories the dove shares, which opens her mind to empathy and emboldens her to take action.

The text a few times repeats that all mice are the same, except the mousewife who is different; but its repetition of the theme hints at the opposite—perhaps the mousewife will set a new trend for all female mice to learn about the world, about empathy, and how to dream, even if it is just in her small corner of the world.

I adore and seek out this theme in midcentury literature and was floored that this children’s book exists echoing it. Thank goodness for The New York Review Children’s Collection for keeping it in print!

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Godden was obsessed by the idea of the captive dove, as shown in her story "Why Not Live Sweetly" from Gone: A Thread of Stories where she quotes the following poem by Shelley:

"I had a dove, and the sweet dove died
And I often thought that it died of grieving.
Why, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied
With a silken thread of my hands' own weaving...
Why! Pretty thing, would you not live with me?
I kissed you oft and gave you white peas.
Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?"

The best part about this book about a house mouse and a captive dove are the illustrations by William Pene du Bois. Godden says in an end-note that she rewrote a story written by Dorothy Wordsworth for her brother William. Wordsworth is certainly not my favourite author, but he deserved better than this. What a disappointment; I had learned to expect better of Godden's older work. Though it is a picture book I would not consider it "for children" as there's no real story, no real resolution, no real interest. When I compare it with the jewel-like stories in "Gone", I confess, my friend, I am disappointed.

[Storywraps · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is beautiful, gentle tale will tug at your heartstrings. The story was inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth's (an English poet and diarist). It is a story composed for her brother William. An ordinary little mouse has seeds of wonder and dreams planted deep in her heart and she always in her mind reaches beyond the everyday, mundane rhyme of her life knowing there is much more beyond her mouse dreary mouse hole.

"She looked the same; she had the same ears and prick nose and whiskers and dewdrop eyes; the same little bones and grey fur; the same skinny paws and long skinny tail.
She did all the things a housewife does: she made a nest for the mouse babies she hoped to have one day; she collected crumbs of food for her husband and herself; once she bit the top off a whole bowl of crocuses; she played with the other mice at midnight on the attic floor.

"What more do you want?" asked her husband.
She did not know what it was she wanted, but she wanted more. "

The little mousewife is constantly looking out the window, her little nose twitching against the windowpane, wondering about apple blossoms, bluebells and what lays beyond the woods.

She and her husband are living in the house of spinster, Miss Barbara Wilkinson. Each day is the same with her daily routine of keeping house, stealing some crumbs to eat so they have meals, and running an efficient home for her husband. Then one morning everything changes. A boy brings a turtle dove that he caught in the woods to the mistress of the house. Happily the lady puts the dove in an elegant cage with gilt bars and serves him peas, lumps of sugar, and pieces of fat. Now the little mousewife is drawn to the dove's food. He refuses to eat it as he is crushed and heartbroken being caged up and he won't even drink the water.

"- he said he did not like water. 'Only dew, dew, dew,' he said.
'What is dew?' asked the mousewife.
"He could not tell her what dew was, but he told her how it shines on the leaves and grass in the early morning for doves to drink. That made him think of night in the woods and how he and his mate would come down with the first light to walk on the earth and peck for food, and of how, then, they would fly over the fields to other woods farther away."

The dove and the mousewife strike up a friendship and she tries with all her might to nurture him and get him to partake of his food which he still refuses. Her crotchety old husband is not happy with her with all the time she spends away from him.

"I do not like it. The proper place for a housewife is in her hole or coming out for crumbs and frolic with me. " The housewife did not answer. She looked far away."

Her husband once bit her on the ear for coming home late and not fetching his food properly and arranging it to his satisfaction. Why should she even bother to think about apple blossoms and such silly things when she could be thinking of .... cheese?

The mousewife has a nestful of babies so her first priority is to her young family and she is unable to visit the dove for quite some time. When she finally does she can't believe what she encounters and is truly shocked. The dove is weak and exhausted, his wings hang limply down because he thinks his close mouse friend has gone away forever and he has hardly eaten a morsel since she has left him.

"He cowered over her with his wings and kissed her with his beak; she had not known his feathers were so soft or that his breast was so warm. 'I thought you were gone, gone, gone,' he said over and over again.
"Tut! Tut!' said the housewife. ' A body has other things to do. I can't be always running off to you.' But, though she pretended to scold him, she had a tear at the end of her whisker for the poor dove."

How could this very tiny but big-hearted creature help this poor trapped dove who was fading away and trapped in that gilded cage? Her dilemma being that she loved having him there with her to tell her of the world beyond thus fuelling her dreams. She has to make a hard decision, should she opt to set him free and not only lose a very close friend and the treats she could attain from him for her ever growing family? Setting him free means he can go back to his beloved mate and his wonderful world outside of the window?

I think you can guess what she chose. I dreamer cannot help but make that choice and off he flew....out the open window...and gone!

'He has flown,' she said. "Now there is no one to tell me about the hills and the corn and the clouds. I shall forget them. How shall I remember when there is no one to tell me and there are so many children and crumbs and bits of fluff to think of?' She had millet tears, not on her whiskers but in her eyes.

Although it grieved her greatly to do so she knew deep down in her heart of hearts that she did the right thing and as she witnesses his ascent into the sky she sees the seemingly shiny little brass buttons twinkling there...

She knew now that they were not buttons but something far and big and strange. 'But not so strange to me,' she said,' for I have seen them myself,'said the mousewife, 'without the dove. I can see for myself,' said the housewife, and slowly, proudly, she walked back to bed.

The story in enriched by the sketches and illustrations of William Pène du Bois. This truly is a timeless classic and I highly, highly recommend this book. It is another winner from the New York review Children's Collection.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely tale of a little mousewife who makes an unexpected friendship with a turtle dove. Through the friendship both are set free, but in different ways. The mousewife's vision and understanding of the world are enlarged through her conversations with the dove. It changes her and thereafter, she is always a little different from the rest of the mice.
A beautiful story about learning, giving, sacrificing, and growing through friendship.

The illustrations by William Pene du Bois in this edition are worth the price of the book. Beautiful.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenges: Wayward Children/Be Sure/The Wild Sasha - South/Underworld (1, happy; 8, red; bonus: under 200 pages; Reading Goal Posts/22 in 2022/new-to-me authors to read/try in 2022. A kind act and experiences shared broaden this little mousewife's vision of the world. A story inspired by Dorothy Woodsworth that she wrote for her brother William according to Godden. Often, it seems, mice are very helpful little creatures in stories. Fastidious and industrious, too. Newbury winner and artist William Pene du Bois brings to life the night world of the little mousewife in black pencil.

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several people have called this a fable, and that is a good way to describe this sweet, gentle book that offers thought-provoking concepts of life and friendship. The first paragraph reminds me of Beatrix Potter's observations of mice living in houses. If you love Potter's books, you'll love this one too although this contains black and white pen and ink illustrations that don't compare with Potter's, but still assist in creating a world of longing between the mousewife and the turtle dove.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story tells of the delicate relationship between a house mouse who is searching for more meaning in her life as a mousewife, and a caged turtledove who longs to be free. As their relationship grows they each learn something about and from each other. The mousewife takes a risk and helps the turtledove in his plight.

[Lynna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have our families childhood copy
copyright 1951
Great story and priceless illustrations.
The end note “This story is taken from one written down in her journal by Dorothy Wordsworth for her brother Willian, the poet. It was quite true, but her mouse l, I am sorry to say, did not let the dove out of its cage. I thought mine should, and she did.” R.G.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to NYRB summer sale, I try some of their childrens' classics every year, and this one was very good. The dilemma of mousewife yearning for something more, and the odd reference to her husband biting her are interesting as is the denouemont.

[Lora · Rating 5 out of 5]

My edition has beautiful naturalized illustrations. Godden builds on an older story and while the effect is a wee bit melancholy, the story and its ending stand strong. Read a long time ago and did not like. Read today and appreciated it in new ways.