Mistress Masham's Repose

Don't let this book fall out of print again before you find and purchase a copy

December, especially around Christmastime, is a lovely season for re-readers. It's usually too cold to go out and do anything useful, it's nice and toasty inside by the fire (especially with some hot cocoa), and most people actually get some vacation time in the month, so there's no good reason to deny oneself the spellbinding pleasure of a beloved book.

I'm already gearing up for several re-reads this season, but chief among them is Mistress Masham's Repose, a little paperback I bought with my babysitting money, based solely on the merits of the cover art, when I was 12 years old. It turned out to be one of my wiser purchases at that age. This lovely, apparently obscure little book was written by one Terence Hanbury White and first published in 1946.

You may better know this author as T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King, and the man primarily responsible for our pop-culture notions of King Arthur. Both the musical Camelot and the Disney animated feature The Sword in the Stone drew on White's characterizations of Arthur. White was a relatively prolific author during his lifetime, writing some fifteen novels and numerous short stories, but everything other than his Arthurian tales has sadly fallen into obscurity. Mistress Masham's Repose has faded in and out of print in the nearly fifty years of its existence, but the lucky few who have stumbled upon a copy in print or come across it in a used bookstore do not soon forget the experience of reading it.

Maria is ten years old, the heiress of a grand but useless fortune—she lives in a huge, rambling, eighteenth-century mansion called Malplaquet (a satirical rendering of the real-life Blenheim Palace) which costs too much to be fixed up, and is therefore falling into ruin. As she is an orphan, Maria has to put up with the constant meddling of a toad-like governess named Miss Brown and equally wretched vicar named (aptly enough) Mr. Hater, both of whom seem to take great pains to make her young life utterly miserable. They siphon off her tiny inheritance, force her to wear humiliating shoes in public, ruin the few presents she receives—worse, they're both searching for a lost document which, if slightly altered, will bequeath the entire mansion and its related sizable inheritance to them instead of Maria.

Happily, Maria is unaware of their machinations. She is a bright and resilient little person who manages to enjoy life in Malplaquet in spite of her wretched guardians. First of all, she has Mrs. Noakes, an old Family Retainer who cooks and cleans; second, she has the Professor, a charmingly eccentric old fellow living in genteel poverty in a nearby gameskeeper's cottage.

White seemed to enjoy transcribing himself into his own books. The character is always the same, and thus readily recognizable as White—a curmudgeonly, thoughtful, highly intelligent, but chronically absent-minded sage—whether named Merlyn or, in this case, the Professor. He lives alone, surrounded by heaps of ancient moldering books, trying to translate obscure volumes from Latin and relying primarily on the kindness of others (notably Mrs. Noakes) to keep from starving altogether. One of the Professor's many charms is his bibliophilia—he owns stacks of rare and valuable books, including a Shakespeare First Folio, but selling a few just to get by never really occurs to him. The Professor likes Maria, who visits him often, although she tends to interrupt his research and her still-unformed sensibilities usually vex him.

One day when Miss Brown has a headache, Maria decides to go exploring on the property. Tooling around in a leaky punt on the Quincunx, a lake at the foot of the south lawn, she manages to land on a little island about the size of a tennis court. In the center of this island, overgrown with weeds and brambles, is a little white cupola called Mistress Masham's Repose. Inside the cupola she discovers a baby, which would be unusual enough even if the baby were not one inch long and lying in a walnut-shell cradle. But as Maria soon discovers, Mistress Masham's Repose has been the secret hiding place of an entire nation for some 240 years—the Empire of Lilliput in Exile, a tribe of tiny people all about six inches in height.

For those preparing to leave the premises at the mere mention of "tiny people," GET BACK HERE! This is not some twee, spun-sugar story about fairies or elves or pixies or any other such nonsense, but a remarkably well thought-out tale that happens to include some very small people living in a human-sized world, and the dangers they face. It owes much more a debt of gratitude to Jonathan Swift than Mother Goose—indeed, White does a pretty good job of imitating Swift's prose, complete with archaic Spelling and extraneous Capital Letters. When the Lilliputian schoolmaster explains to Maria the history of the Empire since the time of Gulliver's Travels, he does so in a quite believable eighteenth-century English diction.

White clearly respects his principal characters, writing them with care. Maria is intelligent, plucky and resourceful, if impulsive (she is, after all, ten). The Lilliputians are believable, realistic beings; only their small size imbues the book with an air of fantasy. They are quite human in their behavior and outlook, concerned with going about the business of their lives, and a brave and gallant people. A major plot point involves a difference of opinion between Maria and the Professor; she has an unfortunate tendency to treat the People as toys, whereas the Professor insists that they are human and must never be played with, as it is insulting to their dignity.

The Professor does have quite a lot to say about human nature and the proper treatment of others—but one of the nicest things about reading T.H. White is that he manages to get his point across without sounding horribly didactic. It's pleasant to see an adult such as the Professor not taking pains to "speak down" to Maria, as many adults do with children; he usually speaks his mind as clearly as possible, and lets Maria figure it out for herself.

White seems to have much the same philosophy in mind for his readers. Although his heroine is decidedly a child in peril, the author is no Lemony Snicket—the words and phrases "monopteron," "mort d'ancestre," "Tripharium" and others are included casually, with no definitions other than those which may be derived from their context. White also assumes his readers have read Gulliver's Travels in its entirety, and are just as well-acquainted with Brobdingnag, Laputa and Houyhnhnm-land as they are with Lilliput and Blefuscu. He continues calmly along with the narrative, assuming his readers are literate enough to follow—or that they are intelligent enough to consult the source material. Having read books by a number of authors who underestimate the intelligence of their audience, I found White to be a refreshing change of pace.

For the record, I saw nothing particularly worrisome in the text when I first read it, and I maintain that there are no serious concerns to children who read it now. However, I suppose some of the following elements might be of concern to adults, so here they are:

Maria is on several occasions offered wine to drink, which she accepts. She does not drink enough to get tipsy. She is regularly mistreated by Miss Brown and the Vicar, and although we are never witness to any scenes of physical abuse, it is clear Miss Brown uses her ruler to mete out punishment on a regular basis. There is also a scuffle which leaves Maria bruised all over, with a black eye. Miss Brown and the Vicar are regularly and deservingly skewered for their blatant hypocrisy as it applies to their Christian faith. Some abbreviated eighteenth-century cursing is used, to great comic effect.

Don't be overly concerned about any of these caveats. The long and short of it is this: if you like the Lilliputians of Jonathan Swift, or the abused orphans of J.K. Rowling or the aforementioned Mr. Snicket; if you give children more credit for intelligence than most of your peers; or if you just appreciate fantasy written with wit and style, then you will certainly love Mistress Masham's Repose. It is currently back in print—no doubt briefly—so scoop up a copy while you still can.

I'd be willing to bet you'll be re-reading it ten Christmases from now.

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