The Mousewife

Very good book. Quick read, good story and beautiful illustrations. Got this for myself to read, but am going to have my 9yr old read it as well.

A beloved treasure of early childhood, THE MOUSEWIFE has haunted me ever since I first read it. It is a deceptively simple tale of a house-bound mouse who befriends a caged dove. But the conversations between the two creatures and the juxtapositions of domestic tasks for the mouse with the longing for the wild of the dove takes on a touching comment on Romanticism. The idea for the story is to be found in Dorothy Wordsworth's journals of Grasmere, which she kept for the pleasure of her brother, the poet William. She, William and Coleridge enjoyed a creative community of writing, but the contributions of Dorothy to this effort are only recently being recognized in feminist studies. Certainly this little story with its themes of domestic security and an awakened sense of the sublime of nature reflects the dilemma of women writers in Romanticism. While in Dorothy's original story the dove dies, in this book the dove is released by the mousewife. I do believe it would be well worth it to publish this book again.