In Praise of Sophie Hatter, the Grumpy, Imperfect Childhood Heroine I Needed (2024)

As a little girl who loved to read, I was offered a parade of books about other little girls—many of whom also loved to read—to find myself in. There was saccharine Heidi, feisty Anne of Green Gables, spoiled Mary in The Little Princess. They were precocious, they rebelled, but their non-fatal flaw was always rectified by the book’s end. Jo March got hold of her temper; Harriet the Spy learned not to be such an asshole to her friends.

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The fictional girl I actually related to was preternaturally cranky and loved to complain. She wore the same gray dress every day. She was shy with strangers, irritable with loved ones. She got mad, snooped in everyone’s business, but also worried about everyone constantly. She was anxious about everything from her future to her family’s well-being. Oh, and she was an 18-year-old in a 90-year-old’s body.

Reading Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) might have been the first time I felt a deep connection to a protagonist. Sophie Hatter, the book’s main character, is a plain young woman cursed to live as an old woman. She’s also a character who falls victim to fairy tale tropes simply because she believes in them.

Sophie is the daughter of a hatter and the eldest of three sisters. This fact is crucial. “In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three,” the book begins. “Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.”

Sophie, we learn, is a denizen of a fairy tale land, and she’s convinced that its tropes will govern her life. She’s obsessed with her doomed fate as the eldest, bemoaning that she is “not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success.” Her mother dies early, in typical fairy tale fashion, and her father remarries Fanny, the mother of the third sister (fortunately, Sophie and her sister Lettie narrowly avoid the fate of becoming Ugly Stepsisters).

The plot really begins when Sophie’s father dies and Fanny sends the older girls to make their fortunes, leaving Sophie to work in the family hat shop. She takes to it in her resigned fashion, convinced it’s the best she can do, and starts wearing only gray and talking to the hats she’s trimming, rather than to the customers. When the book’s glamorous villain, the Witch of the Waste, appears in the shop one day, an altercation ensues and the Witch puts Sophie under a curse that transforms her into an old woman.

But rather than falling into despair, this transformation frees Sophie from the expectations she’d mapped onto her life—there are no stories about old ladies seeking their fortune, so she’s free. She tells herself in the mirror, “This is much more like you really are.”

Soon, Sophie’s adventures lead her to the home of Wizard Howl, rumored to be a great and terrible wizard who lures young ladies and eats their hearts. He lives in a clattering, smoke-chugging moving castle made of cinderblocks that floats above the hills near Sophie’s village. When Sophie stops in the castle to rest, she meets Calcifer the fire demon, who seems to belong to Howl and does much of the castle’s magic, making it move around the hills and controlling its strange door that opens in four different places, depending on which way the door handle is turned. Calcifer makes a deal with Sophie: he’ll try to break her spell if she helps him escape his contract with Howl.

The book is a fun, breezy ride, half fantasy adventure, half domestic farce; the intimately described moving castle becomes a cozy home for both the reader and Sophie. Staying on the pretext of acting as Howl’s much-needed cleaning lady, Sophie is unapologetically concerned with the feminized domestic, always scrubbing and darning and sweeping, exploring her talents in horticulture and sewing.

Young readers used to protagonists their own age end up following this unlikely heroine—an old crone stomping around, complaining of aches and pains and demanding respect, all while cleaning and snooping through a wizard’s house and serving up bacon sandwiches for dinner.

Meanwhile, the titular wizard upsets fairy tale gender norms. Howl is proud and haughty, obsessed with chasing women, and overly precious about his looks. He’s petulant and throws tantrums when things don’t go his way. He knows there’s a curse or prophecy hanging over his head that hinges on a certain date, and he still goes out and gets drunk with his rugby team the night before.

The big reveal of the book, the narrative trick, is that Sophie is a witch herself. Her particular brand of magic is described as “talking life into things.” A quirky character trait—her habit of talking to inanimate objects—turns out to be a key element of the book: her walking stick is essentially a magic wand, the fake spells she sold townspeople on Howl’s behalf actually work, and of course, she is the one keeping herself old. The witch’s original curse had already been lifted—but by repeatedly telling herself and everyone around her what she was, she made it true.

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If you want to “empower” a young girl, an internet search seems to suggest, you can simply purchase a book. Amazon carries an entire section of “Empowering Books for Young Girls”; Barnes & Noble, Scholastic, and A Mighty Girl, among others, offer lists to the same effect. A quick Google search yields plenty of results, and though Robert Munsch’s 1980 Paper Bag Princess shows up, most other top hits seem to have been published post-2016. Many of the titles have worlds like “trailblazer,” “rebel,” “confident”; some are compendiums of famous women in science or throughout history; several are by Chelsea Clinton.

Even as a child, many books gave me the distinct impression that I was reading something about kids rather than for kids. An overly didactic book can accidentally limit its scope rather than expand it. And while there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with hoping to bolster young girls or correct sexist narratives from previous generations, some of these empowerment-forward books feel to me like posturing for the gaze of a secondary, hidden reader—a parent or a political adversary, perhaps—rather than the genuine outgrowth of a desire to tell stories.

In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C.S. Lewis describes a kind of children’s literature that grows collaboratively between author and child. “The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child … [Y]ou are dealing with a concrete person, this child who, of course, differs from all other children.” He continues, asserting that through the telling, “the two participants modify each other. You would become slightly different because you were talking to a child and the child would become slightly different because it was being talked to by an adult. A community, a composite personality, is created and out of that the story grows.”

This reminds me of how Sophie herself changes through her interactions with others in the novel. Her spats with Howl teach her that she is opinionated, not demure; her conniving with the fire demon reveals her intelligence and magical ability; her misapprehensions of her sisters shows her that just because she’s the oldest doesn’t mean she knows everything.

By the end, a community grows around her, literally: she stands in the castle surrounded by her friends and family members, all of them working out how they know each other. When Sophie is reunited with Fanny, she realizes she’d been putting her in the role of evil stepmother: “She should have known Fanny better,” she reflects. “She was ashamed.” Wynne Jones resists both the urge to play into the evil stepmother trope and to directly subvert it. Rather, she tells us that Fanny—like nearly all the book’s characters—is neither wicked nor good, just an imperfect person with her own motivations and interests.

Another fairy tale trope plays out, as well: Sophie and Howl fall in love. But the book dances between falling for and subverting this cliche. It’s Sophie who saves the wizard, by returning his heart to him; their love is not swooning but a realization borne of time spent growing closer to each other. In Wynne Jones’s version of a fairy-tale ending, “Sophie knew that living happily ever after with Howl would be a good deal more eventful than any story made it sound, though she was determined to try.”

Sophie’s journey mirrored the ways I felt changed by my readings of the book through my childhood. It spoke to me as a shy girl with a tendency to rely too much on what she read in books to tell her what life should be like. But the revelation of Sophie’s magic also opened up the possibility that I could shape my own identity. Like Sophie, I could speak things into existence.

Despite all I learned from Sophie’s story, I see the book as more than a morality tale—it’s lack of didacticism ironically made it more influential to me. The book’s dedication seems to reflect some version of C.S. Lewis’s ethos: “This one is for Stephen,” Wynne Jones writes. “The idea for this book was suggested by a boy in a school I was visiting, who asked me to write a book called The Moving Castle. I wrote down the name and put it in such a safe place that I have been unable to find it ever since. I would like to thank him very much.”

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Howl’s Moving Castle is the rare story that centers around a girl’s imaginative abilities without succumbing to mere whimsy. Sophie’s imagination is powerful, even when used unconsciously. Yet discovering her magic isn’t just about finding her power—it’s a perspective shift. She’d been so convinced of her path as the eldest daughter that she limited her own possibilities.

The book subtly hints at where Sophie’s iron-clad worldview comes from. We’re told that she “read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future.”

Howl’s dramatizes a fundamental tension of childhood, between the cultural expectations produced by the media kids consume (much of which is explicitly meant to be instructive) and the futures and desires in their own minds. While many children’s books follow protagonists who are readers themselves, this suspicion of stories feels rare for the genre. Sophie looks to stories to tell her what her life will be, and she buys into it entirely, to her detriment.

As much as Howl’s is about the interpretation of stories, it’s also about creating our own. We tell ourselves lies—or, to be more generous, stories—about who we are all the time. That’s the strange beauty of words: they both hold and confer power. We speak things into existence.

The “curse” that Howl is under, which Sophie originally misidentifies as a spell, is really a poem by John Donne, written on a child’s homework assignment. (“‘Go and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake’s root, / Show me where the past years are, / Or who cleft the devil’s foot, / Teach me to hear mermaids singing, / Or to keep off envy’s stinging, / And find / What wind / Serves to advance and honest mind.’ Tell what this is about and write a second verse yourself.”) Even Donne’s poetry, even curses, Wynne Jones seems to be saying, are not above revision.

Ultimately, what I most related to as a kid was Sophie’s own fallibility in grasping the contours of her burgeoning identity. Sophie opened my eyes to the magic of our self-creation as children, the limits of following familiar narratives, and the inherent power we each possess, no matter if we’re brave or careful, smart or stubborn, brash or thoughtful. The book’s grand conclusion is less about change than self-revelation. Perhaps all children’s books are meant to teach something, but Howl’s Moving Castle shows that real magic lies in the story’s collaboration with the child who reads it. Like Sophie, the most gratifying lessons I learned were the ones I figured out myself.