The Mousewife

The Mousewife
Rumer Godden 1951
Illustrated by William Pene Du Bois

It has been given to few mice to see the stars; so rare is it that the mousewife had not even heard of them, and when she saw them shining she thought at first they must be new brass buttons. Then she saw they were very far off, farther than the garden or the wood, beyond the farthest trees. “But not too far for me to see,” she said. 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. And I have seen them for myself,” said the housewife, “without the dove. I can see for myself,” said the mousewife, and slowly, proudly, she walked back to bed.




A story retold from one written by Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister). The mousewife takes care of her husband and all her children and then her world is changed when she meets a caged dove. A beautiful introduction to Romanticism.