

“I feel something changed inside of me,” she says in the movie. ‘I will not.’ I cannot be wed without my consent, can I?”Ī similar transformation appears in the film. “It occurred to me that what actually makes people married is not the church or the priest but their consent, their ‘I will,’” Birdy realizes in the book. In Catherine, Called Birdy, the main character learns that hope is a discipline. In a bildungsroman, the main character grows-both morally and psychologically. Readers who fell for the young hero’s spunk in the face of the patriarchy will see it carefully preserved onscreen. “Go on crusades, cut their hair, be horse trainers, laugh very loud, marry whom they will, be monks, drink in ale houses, go to hangings.” “Things girls cannot do,” Birdy, played by Bella Ramsey, narrates. When Birdy’s father finds out, he beats her on the hand with a rod.

In the movie, Birdy and Perkin (also her best friend) intercept the first of Birdy’s many suitors, a man from Kent (Russell Brand), and prank him, sending him away before he ever has a chance to reach the manor. “Go on crusades, be horse trainers, be monks, laugh very loud, wear breeches, drink in ale houses, cut their hair, piss in the fire to make it hiss, wear nothing, be alone, get sunburned, run, marry whom they will, glide on ice.” “I thought to make a list of all the things girls are not allowed to do,” she writes. Perkin (the goat boy) and Gerd (the miller’s son) polish bones from the kitchen and fasten them to their shoes to go ice skating, but Birdy isn’t allowed. In a memorable moment from the book, a river in Stonebridge freezes over. Read More: The 52 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2022 What stayed the same in the adaptationįrom the page to the screen, Birdy retains the timeless voice that made her an epitome of rebellion to fiercely independent teenage girls. “It taught us about consent, showed us that we alone owned our bodies and minds and futures.” “For a particular age bracket of millennial women, this book was our first feminist guidebook,” writes Jeanna Kadlec for Nylon. But the backbone of the book-visceral frustration with the unfairness of becoming a woman in society-rings clear and true through the centuries.

From there unfolds a regular, angsty, wide-eyed account of a 14-year-old girl’s daily life in 1290: embroidery, lady lessons, fleas, family tensions, and the looming threat of an arranged marriage.
