Customer Reviews

Mistress Masham's Repose

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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Orphaned Maria lives alone in Malplaquet, the vast and ruined eighteenth-century country house which is her sole inheritance from her parents. Her guardians, the odious vicar Mr. Hater and the oppressive governess Miss Brown, strive unceasingly to keep Maria firmly in her place and under control. But Maria has too much spirit and wit to be kept down, and though she has no friends her own age, she does have allies of a sort: Cook, who keeps a bicycle handy for getting around the vast corridors of Malplaquet, and the eccentric and distracted Professor, who lives nearby in a cottage crammed with books. Though they're adults, Cook and the Professor are powerless too against the organized, bland-faced evil of Mr. Hater and Miss Brown, and Maria is on her own when she battles them. And she does battle: at first guerrilla warfare, and later out-and-out pitched engagements, in some of the funniest scenes ever committed to paper.

Initially Maria's revolts are small. She sneaks out while Miss Brown suffers from headache and visits one of her hideaways: a pond, which has an island holding an abandoned summer-house in the center, once a focal point of the glorious gardens but now like the rest overgrown and wild. Maria lands on her island and finds that it's not, however, unoccupied: tiny people live there as well. The island is hers; the summerhouse is hers; and Maria considers that the people are hers as well.

The practical and impractical things Maria does with, and for, her little people and what they do with, and for, Maria is the heart of the book. Subtly, this is a story about power---the vicar's and governess's over Maria, Maria's over the little people---and revolt. Maria, a tough soul who nonetheless suffers under domination, faces a choice when she finds her Lilliputians, and it's not an easy one. White is too honest to give us a snap cheap solution: Maria isn't perfect, but her heart is true, and in the end she deserves the heroic efforts of her seemingly-powerless friends on her behalf and earns all the happiness we want her to have.

White was a pathologically peculiar character, yet his formula for a good children's book is still completely winning. He knew precisely which elements belong in a story about an orphaned child (Wart or Maria), a mysterious wizardly advisor (Merlin or the Professor), and a great destiny to be achieved (kingship or Malplaquet) with magical or otherworldly assistance (Merlin's enchantments or the indomitable Lilliputians). It is a shame he didn't leave us more YA writing than Mistress Masham and The Sword in the Stone, but we shouldn't be greedy: in Mistress Masham's Repose alone is a story worth any hundred others.

White never speaks down to his young reader, never misses a chance to make a reference or an intelligent observation. It's this assumption that everything that interests him will interest you, even if you're 10, that makes him so endearing and makes the writing in these stories so wonderful. The layers on layers of truths and facts and skewed references ("Like all Admirals, he sat his rat badly") make Maria's story utterly convincing, and the Lilliputians become just one more part of the eighteenth century to survive, to our eyes odd but as plausible in context as, say, Horace Walpole.

Readers who like Mistress Masham will also love Mary Norton's Borrowers series, written starting in 1953, well after Mistress Masham appeared in 1946. (The books are far better than the truly awful recent movie would imply.) They can safely skip John Peterson's Littles; Norton's Borrowers are more original and far better. E. B. White's Stuart Little, also about a small person in a big world, is a different kind of story altogether and not derivative of either.

Looking for a copy of this book for a friend, I was surprised to find only a fancy reproduction edition listed as being in print. And an edition without the essential original Fritz Eichenberg illustrations, at that. Putnam, the original publisher, had Mistress Masham in print recently, and it *must* still be available; it probably turns up on school book-club lists too.

I first read this book when I was ten. I'd found and ancient copy, hardbound in an ugly yellow. I don't even know where it came from but I loved it! I would pick it up every couple of years and get reabsorbed as always. It is a funny story full of great characters with the Vicar and Miss Brown as the perfect villains. This is a great story for any age. I highly recommend it. I've since replaced that old yellow book with a fresh new copy. Buy this book. I guarantee you will love it.

Maria is a ten-year-old orphan girl, growing up in her crumbling ancestral home, under the authority of a cold guardian and a tyrannical governess. But when Maria paddles over to a small island in the center of a lake on the grounds, she makes a marvelous discovery: the island is peopled by Lilliputians. Yes, the sea captain who rescued Gulliver so long ago, returned, and trapped a group of the unfortunate Lilliputians for a sideshow act. But, they had escaped, and built themselves a new home on the island called Mistress Masham's Repose. Unfortunately, human nature has changed very little over the last three hundred years, and the Lilliputian's safety exists only in their being unknown to the humans living around them. Can Maria safeguard the little people from her greedy guardian and governess?

I caught the title of this charming book quite by accident, but am delighted to have it! Author T.H. White (who also wrote The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King) did an excellent job of building a magical world set into our own, peopled with characters that are fascinating, scary, charming, humorous, and so much more! The storyline kept me on the edge of my seat, as I watched Maria and the Lilliputians adventure through the book.

This is an excellent book for young readers, and for adults as well. I highly recommend this book to everyone!

What can I say that has not already been said? Even more, what can I say that will adequately convey my love for this book? Common sense dictates that not all books ever written can be perpetually in print and easily available, but I have never understood how this book has been allowed its spotty history. It is truly a book for everyone of all ages, and in my estimation should be considered White's best, even outstripping his famous "The Once and Future King," which for all its beauty is a seriously flawed work. "Mistress Masham's Repose" is didactic, too, but its teaching is not painful, and performs the miraculous feat of sending the reader, whether child or adult, on an eager search for more information. And yet, the work is not slow or tiresome, and White never talks down to anyone, even when his comedy verges on that of the music hall. Books like this should never disappear, and once you fall under its spell you will read it again and again.

I don't know how I missed this masterpiece during my childhood! I know I would have hungrily devoured the story of 10 year old Maria who discovered the descendants of the Lilliputians that Gulliver/Swift wrote about in GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.

T.H. White imagines the tiny world so perfectly! Also well-done are the other characters: The doddering yet ultimately wise and resourceful Professor; the bilious Vicar; Miss Brown, Maria's objectionable governess; and Maria herself, who does not appear on the first page of the novel as a child already wise beyond her years, but rather, a real child, that struggles with her feelings about wanting to play with the Lilliputians like toys, which is a perfectly normal response.

There is a great deal of humor in the book, and also a great many literary asides, which make it fun for the adult reader.

I got this for my niece, a 10-year-old re-reader of the Potter books. I had read it in my early teen years, and followed up with the King Author books. The political undercurrents were invisible to me then, and don't add much now.

She said she liked it. I'll probably get her the Sword in the Stone for Christmas.

It has a happy ending. I had a crush on the protagonist as illustrated by Eichenberg. At 52 it is difficult to be sure of one's competence in reviewing a book for young people, but the memory of it persisted so long that I missed it, long since lost, and paid an exorbitant price for a used copy for my daughter a few years ago. She liked it too.

Odious though comparisons may be, I find more magic in the characters populating Mistress Masham's Repose than I do those in the Potter books. I think, too, that there is something to be said for the progressive maturity of the subsequent White books. Years from now my daughter and niece (and I) will still be enjoying T.H. White.

I have wished that i could go to Lilliput; in fact, i seem to recall reading a book with jealousy years ago in which a child or children went to Lilliput in the modern worl. Now, it seems, it would not be possible. The only remaining Lilliputians were kidnapped in the Eighteenth Century and brought to England to be displayed. They escaped and have been living for two hundred years on an otherwise empty island in the property, Malplaquet, of an ancient family. The current representative of the family is a poverty-stricken ten year old girl who discovers the little people. The tale shows the results, both bad and good, for them and for her. This is a delightful book; neither too easy for an adult nor too hard (as if there is such a thing) for a child. The villains, a Vicar and a Governess, are just funny enough to tip the balance away from any true fear for Maria ~ the little girl ~ and allow for full enjoyment of the ridiculous characters, situations, and resolutions White offers. It is quite true that "Gulliver's Travels" was, when written, a savage and cutting satire, whereas now we read it for enjoyment as children. "Misstress Masham's Repose" likewise contains more than a simple children's story; likewise, though, it is the story future generations will read it for.

TH White's book has a classically "fantasy" premise: what if the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels had actually existed, indeed, still existed, hidden in the midst of an overgrown English landed estate? What would an encounter with them teach us (through the child Maria, her bullying overseers, and her beloved friends the Cook and the Professor) about our responsibilities to others? About how to determine what values to put at the center of our lives?

Few authors are able to construct a fully functioning, utterly persuasive magical world into which readers may enter, lose themselves, leave reluctantly and then return without any diminishment of effect: books one puts on the list to read annually. Most "high" literature is demanding in a different way: Moby Dick, for example, fits within this realm but who could afford the discipline Melville demands, year in and year out, in the midst of child-rearing, jobs, marriages good and bad, the demands of everyday life? These authors by contrast find a way to seduce the reader, with a seductiveness that is morally unimpeachable. Of these, the most famous, legendary, is Tolkien. Tolkien's work is portentous-- some would say pretentious-- and he barely resists the urge to preach. His work is allegory first, novel second. He asks readers to submit to him, and that monarchical elitism is disturbing even as it's seductive.
By contrast, T.H. White wrote works that existed at the edge of fact and fantasy, of historical imagination and moral imagination. The Once and Future King, his best-known epic, remains one of the most richly descriptive works of the genre, and the characters, even despite their bulldozering by Hollywood first and Disney after, remain affecting when you return to them on the actual page.
Mistress Masham's Repose is the most whimsical and most charming of his books, and it is meant to appeal with equal force to awkward children, disaffected adolescents, and adults. We believe in these characters, we recognize them not as caricatures but as real people seen with the inevitable enlarged clarity of those alienated by sensibility, by youth, or by ostracism. Some we love, some we hate, and all loom over us. For this reason, WE are the Lilliputians, just as we are the awkward difficult Maria, the brilliant befuddled Professor, and even the bullies who torment them. This is one of those books that evoke an era, create a world, and confirm or transform one's own view of one's own world. You leave it for the landscape of everyday life a bit dazzled, recognizing anew those you love, those you fear, and the responsibilities you have to all around you.

A marvelous book that deserves to be reprinted, this is the story of a ten-year-old orphan girl living on a huge moldering English estate with her nasty governess. She discovers a group of Lilliputians who have been living on an island on the estate since they escaped from the sideshow into which they were put by an associate of Lemuel Gulliver many years before. There's a good T.H.White homepage with a far more complete review at http://home.techlink.net/~moulder/mistress.html. Like the best children's literature, this is written so well as to be a delight to any adult reading it to his children (as my mother read it to me in the mid-fifties). Find a copy in the library, if you can.

After finishing university T. H. White worked as a teacher in the Stowe School which occupies a gigantic former Baroque stately home: here he conceived of the idea of Malplaquet, modeled after the greatest of all British country homes, Blenheim Palace, where the Dukes of Marlborough have lived and where Winston Churchill was born and raised. Malplaquet, an imaginary dilapidated repository of all its nation's history (we find out the Princes in the Tower were executed in its medieval dungeon, which also contains the ax which beheaded Charles I), would make a wonderful setting for any book, but rather than use it for a Gothic (the obvious choice), here White had the inspiration to make it the setting for a children's fantasy. White's mansion is not only the home of the little girl Maria who has inherited the estate (and not much else) and her warders--some cruel, some kind--but also a group of Lilliputians brought over from their island home during the time of Swift, whom Maria encounters one day. Maria's encounter with the Lilliputians becomes for her a means for learning about the nature of tyranny--both that exercised over herself by her guardian the Vicar Mr. Hater and her governess Miss Brown, but also that she herself can hardly keep herself from exercising over the Lilliputian community hidden on her estate.

This is a children's book that, to be honest, will best be appreciated by adults. White imagined his readers not only familiar with GULLIVER'S TRAVELS but also with some of the history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England: American children particularly today would be confused as to who Mistresses Masham and Morley were, or what Malplaquet is named after, or even who Gulliver was. And their patience might well be tried by White's love of Wodehousean "types": the bluff Lord Lieutenant with an obsession with horses and hounds, and Maria's mentor the absent-minded and esoteric antiquarian the Professor . But adults (and even older children) should love this book, and its well-structured narrative is a real pleasure.