Mistress Masham's Repose, by White, T. H.
Inventory #: 00590
Price: $10.00

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Mistress Masham's Repose, by White, T. H.. G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1946. Edition: Assumed Book Club Edition.. , 255 pages. Yellow cloth with brown lettering on spine, and small line drawing of a Lilliputian aboard a mouse on the cover. End papers show a map of the Palace of Malplaquet, drawn by Raymond McGrath. Book is illusterated with numerous line drawings by Fritz Eichenberg. This is either a First Edition or a book club edition. There is no jacket to check for price, and it has a brown dot (not an indentation) on the lower right hand corner of the back cover.

Condition: Good Plus. No jacket. Cover lightly soiled, spine ends and corners bumped, page edges grayed from shelf dust. Book opens easily and lays flat. Interior pages all clean and well attached. (Page 21/22 has a tear down half its length, although no material has been lost.)

Contents: From the 1946 book jacket:

Not since The Sword in the Stone has that unique genius, T. H. White, produced so fresh and enchanting a tale as this story of a new Lilliput in our own day.

Maria, ten years old and an orphan, lived in Malplaquet, with an unkind governess and a kindly old cook. The house, "surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges, was about four times longer than Buckingam Palace, but was falling down."

Not since the death of Queen Anne had anybody reposed in a temple on an island in the lake called Quincunx, but it was known as Mistress Masham's Repose. There Maria, freed by one of Miss Brown's headaches for a piratical excursion, came upon the first of her Lilliputians. She abducted two of them, a mother and baby, who were not pleased, but returned them to the island when her friend the Professor pointed out that she would scarcely win their love by wrapping them up in dirty handkerchiefs.

The story of the Lilliputians gradually came to light. Some two hundred years before, their forebears had been carried off from Lilliput by the notorious Captain Biddel and brought to England to be exhibited. The venture was all too successful, but the Captain, on a visit to Malplaquet, had imbibed too freely and gave them their chance to escape to the secret island, where they had lived ever since, continuing their civilization and cleverly adjusting themselves to the new environment.

Try as she would, Maria could not quite resist the role of benevolent dictator; she could think up such handsome ways to help her little people. But eventually she learned to let them live their own lives, to exercise their own quite marvelous ingenuity. So she and they gained, both in self-respect and in mutual respect. She had reason to be glad of their devotion when Miss Brown and the wicked Vicar learned her secret and incarcerated her. The Lilliputians bravely swarmed to her rescue and not only freed her but brought her enemies to their destruction and restored to Maria her great inheritance.

The astute reader may discover some profound truths lurking in the shadows of Mr. White's fantasy. But they do not force their way to the foreground, and the story is none the worse for their presence.