Mrs Caliban by Laura Ingalls – #ABookADayInMay – Day 6

Mrs Caliban (1982) by Laura Ingalls was all over the place when it was reprinted by Faber a few years ago – one of those reprints that dominated end-of-year lists. It certainly caught my attention, but I didn’t get around to reading it until my friend Clare gave me a copy for my birthday last year, and I raced through its 117 pages this evening. The title obviously reminds us of the monstrous figure from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but Mrs Caliban is, in fact, a very ordinary housewife – Dorothy Caliban. She has gone through the unbearable trauma of a child dying, followed shortly by a miscarriage. Her husband is having an affair, not very subtly. A vision of the American dream of white-picket domesticity has been systematically torn apart, and yet Dorothy cannot escape from the role she had anticipated playing in it. Despite having to grieve the children and being poorly treated by the husband, she must still be the housewife. She must still wash and fold laundry, clean the house,…