Mistress Masham's Repose

Terence Hanbury White (1906–1964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Queen's College, Cambridge. His childhood was unhappy–?"my parents loathed each other," he later wrote–?and he grew up to become a solitary person with a deep fund of strange lore and a tremendous enthusiasm for fishing, hunting, and flying (which he took up to overcome his fear of heights). White taught for some years at the Stowe School until the success in 1936 of England Have My Bones, a book about outdoor adventure, allowed him to quit teaching and become a full-time writer. Along with The Goshawk, White was the author of twenty-six published works, including his famed sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King; the fantasy Mistress Masham's Repose (published in The New York Review Children's Collection); a collection of essays on the eighteenth century, The Age of Scandal; and a translation of a medieval Latin bestiary, A Book of Beasts. He died at sea on his way home from an American lecture tour and is buried in Piraeus, Greece. »

Mistress Masham's Repose

By T.H. White
Illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg

"She saw: first, a square opening, about eight inches wide, in the lowest step...finally she saw that there was a walnut shell, or half one, outside the nearest door...she went to look at the shell—but looked with the greatest astonishment. There was a baby in it."

So ten-year-old Maria, orphaned mistress of Malplaquet, discovers the secret of her deteriorating estate: on a deserted island at its far corner, in the temple long ago nicknamed Mistress Masham's Repose, live an entire community of people—"The People," as they call themselves—all only inches tall. With the help of her only friend—the absurdly erudite Professor—Maria soon learns that this settlement is no less than the kingdom of Lilliput (first seen in Gulliver's Travels) in exile. Safely hidden for centuries, the Lilliputians are at first endangered by Maria's well-meaning but clumsy attempts to make their lives easier, but their situation grows truly ominous when they are discovered by Maria's greedy guardians, who look at The People and see only a bundle of money.

Reviews

One of the finest, most magical and extraordinary children's books ever written.
— Anne Fine, Children's Laureate of Britain

Also see:

The Goshawk
By T.H. White
Introduction by Marie Winn

"When I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered with sacking." What the author of The Once and Future King discovered beneath this unpromising cover was much more than Gos—the hawk he acquired after reading century-old falconry training manuals—but a tragicomic battle both of endurance and wills unlike anything he'd experienced before.

Beyond Harry Potter Collection

Charlotte Sometimes, The House of Arden, Mistress Masham's Repose, and The Wind on the Moon

Format: Hardcover
Retail Price: $16.95
Price: $13.56 (20% off)

May 15, 2004
255 pages
ISBN: 1590171039
9781590171035
Literature in English
NYR Children's Collection

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