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Summary: A delightful adventure in the English Orphan genre
Review: 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.
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Summary: If you like Hermoine better than Harry
Review: 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.
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Summary: one of the small list of truly magical books
Review: 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.
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Summary: An orphan girl and her adventures with Lilliputians
Review: What if: after the publication of Gulliver's Travels, some unscrupulous men went to Lilliput, captured some of the inhabitants, and brought them back to exhibit in a sideshow? And what if some years later they escaped and took up residence in a moldering summer house on a forgotten island in a pond on the middle of a huge estate, where they lived their lives undiscovered for two centuries, until the orphan girl who lives there in modern times finds them? This is the intriguing premise of Mistress Masham's Repose, an unjustly forgotten work by the great T.H. White. This is the story of the girl's discovery, and how it changes her life and theirs. Complete with evil governess, scheming vicar, and seeming miles of passageways and mysterious rooms in the huge house, this is a great adventure book with a girl as the hero. My sisters and I loved it in the 50's, our children have loved our old copy in the 80's and 90's, and now t's being republished. Highly recommended.
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