The Mousewife - Hardcover

Godden, Rumer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590173104 ISBN 13: 9781590173107

Publisher: NYR Children's Collection, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Rumer Godden (1907–1998) grew up in India, where her father ran a steamship company. When her husband left her penniless in Calcutta with two daughters to raise, she started to write books to pay off her many debts. She wrote more than sixty books for adults and young adults, including The Doll’s House, Impunity Jane, The Greengage Summer, and An Episode of Sparrows (also published by The New York Review Children’s Collection).

William Pène du Bois (1916–1993) was born in New Jersey to a family of artists and educated mostly in France. A founding editor of The Paris Review, Pène du Bois wrote some twenty-five books, many of which he also illustrated, including The Twenty-One Balloons, winner of the 1948 Newbery Medal.

Review

"Rumer Godden's The Mousewife, first illustrated in 1951 and reissued by The New York Review Children's Collection, is a gentle fable of liberation that the prolific British novelist and biographer, who died in 1998, wrote after escaping a loveless first marriage...Disarmingly illustrated by William Pene du Bois, this little book makes a case for empathy and daring: Why creep when you can fly?" --O, The Oprah Magazine

About this edition

• Publisher: NYR Children's Collection
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1590173104
• ISBN 13: 9781590173107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 56
• Illustrator: Du Bois William Pene