One in a series of posts dedicated to pop-culture depictions of mice — as symbolic representations of abject other, rebellious scamp, intrepid explorer, scrappy survivor, resourceful collaborator, and habitat experimenter — from 1904–2003.

The Rescuers is a British children’s novel written by Margery Sharp. The first edition, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1959.  

Miss Bianca, a poet, is an elegant white mouse pampered by an ambassador’s little boy. Because the ambassador is about to be transferred to Norway, where a (human) poet is wrongfully imprisoned in the Black Castle, the Prisoners’ Aid Society, an international organization of mice dedicated to brightening the lives of prisoners, recruits her to lend a hand. Though written for an adult audience, the book became highly popular with children.

Miss Bianca is a terrific example of a mouse character as resourceful collaborator — a meme that dates back at least to “The Lion and the Mouse,” one of Aesop’s Fables, the moral of which is that there is no being so small that it cannot help a greater.

Sharp, who’d previously written some two dozen novels for adults, continued the series with a further eight books. The Walt Disney animated film The Rescuers, released in 1977, was adapted primarily from the second installment in the series, Miss Bianca. Eva Gabor voices Miss Bianca.