Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) is a novel by T. H. White

T. H. White

Terence Hanbury White was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.-Biography:...

 that describes the adventures of a girl who discovers a group of Lilliputians, a race of tiny people from Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

's satirical classic Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...

. The story is set in Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire is a landlocked county in the English East Midlands, with a population of 629,676 as at the 2001 census. It has boundaries with the ceremonial counties of Warwickshire to the west, Leicestershire and Rutland to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshire to the south-east,...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, during or just after the Second World War; in one chapter Maria plays at being General Eisenhower greeting grateful subject peoples. Yet there is also a strong flavour of the 18th century, both the fictional land of Lilliput

Lilliput and Blefuscu

Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The two islands are neighbors in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel eight hundred yards wide. Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about...

 and the British Empire of Swift, Gibbon

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...

, and Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

. Imperialism, and the need for self-governance, is a major theme in the novel.

Plot

Maria, a ten-year-old orphaned girl, lives on a derelict estate, her only companions a loving family Cook and a retired Professor of Ancient Latin. These are often unable to protect Maria from her tall, fat, strict Governess, Miss Brown. The Governess makes the child's life miserable. She takes her cue from Maria's guardian, a Vicar named Mr. Hater, the reason why Maria is poor and abandoned. The little girl does not go to school. In church, she has to walk all the way to her seat in over-sized boots which make a great deal of noise. She is shy, lonely, and starved for affection. Meeting the Lilliputians, and being tempted both to fear and to bullying, she must save her friends and herself.

Setting

The ruinous estate Malplaquet has a name and palace similar to that of from Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace  is a monumental country house situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, residence of the dukes of Marlborough. It is the only non-royal non-episcopal country house in England to hold the title of palace. The palace, one of England's largest houses, was built between...

, the residence of the Dukes of Marlborough. The name is an historical in-joke

In-joke

An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or in joke, is a joke whose humour is clear only to people who are in a particular social group, occupation, or other community of common understanding...

; it depends upon knowing that Blenheim

Battle of Blenheim

The Battle of Blenheim , fought on 13 August 1704, was a major battle of the War of the Spanish Succession. Louis XIV of France sought to knock Emperor Leopold out of the war by seizing Vienna, the Habsburg capital, and gain a favourable peace settlement...

 was the first of the first duke

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, Prince of Mindelheim, KG, PC , was an English soldier and statesman whose career spanned the reigns of five monarchs through the late 17th and early 18th centuries...

's great battles, and Malplaquet

Battle of Malplaquet

The Battle of Malplaquet, fought on 11 September 1709, was one of the main battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, which opposed the Bourbons of France and Spain against an alliance whose major members were the Habsburg Monarchy, Great Britain, the United Provinces and the Kingdom of...

 was his fourth and last. The titular Repose is a tiny forgotten island in the middle of the lake in the grounds of Malplaquet, which is occupied by descendants of the Lilliputians, brought to England two centuries earlier. It provides the perfect setting for their timid and secretive civilisation, as it is only accessible by boat and protected by a wall of brambles, carefully cultivated by the island's occupants. Many of the monuments in the grounds of Malplaquet recall notable figures of the early 18th century; Mistress Masham's Repose commemorates Abigail Masham, a close confidante

Confidante

A confidante is a type of sofa, originally characterized by a triangular seat at each end, so that people could sit at either end of the sofa and be close to the person sitting in the middle...

 of Queen Anne

Anne of Great Britain

Anne ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Act of Union, two of her realms, England and Scotland, were united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain.Anne's Catholic father, James II and VII, was deposed during the...

, who however has no other significance to the story. However, she was a cousin of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

Sarah Churchill , Duchess of Marlborough rose to be one of the most influential women in British history as a result of her close friendship with Queen Anne of Great Britain.Sarah's friendship and influence with Princess Anne was widely known, and leading public figures...

, thus providing another link between the fictional Palace of Malplaquet and the real Blenheim Palace.

Reissue

The book was out of print for many years but was re-issued by The New York Review Children's Collection

The New York Review Children's Collection

New York Review Books Children's Collection is a series of children's books released under the publishing imprint New York Review Books. This series' mission is to reintroduce some of the many children's books that have fallen out of print, or simply out of mainstream attention...

.

In the UK, it was printed in, at least, the years 1947, 1963, 1972 and 1979. 2000, it went out of print in 2009.
It is scheduled to be republished by Red Fox Books in 2011