Mistress Masham's Repose

T.H. White

mar 2012 · New York Review of Books

Rreth këtij libri elektronik

An orphan discovers the secret world of Gulliver’s Travels in this kids classic from the author of The Once and Future King—for readers ages 9-12.

“One of the finest, most magical and extraordinary children’s books ever written.” — Anne Fine, Children’s Laureate of Britain

Ten-year-old Maria, the orphaned mistress of Malplaquet, discovers the secret of her deteriorating estate . . . On a deserted island, in the temple nicknamed Mistress Masham’s Repose, live the community “The People” —all only inches tall. With the help of her only friend—the absurdly erudite Professor—Maria soon learns this settlement is no less than the exiled kingdom of Lilliput first seen in Gulliver’s Travels.
 
Safely hidden for centuries, the Lilliputians are at first endangered by Maria’s well-meaning but clumsy attempts to make their lives easier—but their situation grows ominous when they are discovered by Maria’s greedy guardians, who look at The People and see only a bundle of money.
 
Hailed as “one of the finest, most magical and extraordinary children’s books ever written” (Anne Fine, Children’s Laureate of Britain), Mistress Masham’s Repose has enchanted young readers for over 7 decades.

Rreth autorit

Terence Hanbury White (1906–1964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge. His childhood was unhappy–”my parents loathed each other,” he later wrote–and he grew up to become a solitary person with a deep fund of strange lore and a tremendous enthusiasm for fishing, hunting, and flying (which he took up to overcome his fear of heights). White taught for some years at the Stowe School until the success in 1936 of England Have My Bones, a book about outdoor adventure, allowed him to quit teaching and become a full-time writer. Along with The Goshawk, White was the author of twenty-six published works, including his famed sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King; the fantasy Mistress Masham’s Repose (published in The New York Review Children’s Collection); a collection of essays on the eighteenth century, The Age of Scandal; and a translation of a medieval Latin bestiary, A Book of Beasts. He died at sea on his way home from an American lecture tour and is buried in Piraeus, Greece.

Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) was born and raised in Germany, where he became a successful political cartoonist. The rise of Hitler made him worry about his family’s safety, and in 1933 he left Germany for the United States, where he illustrated classics such as Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights, along with the pages of Dorothy Day’s radical news-sheet The Catholic Worker. Eichenberg also founded the Pratt Graphic Arts Center in Manhattan. He considered his teaching work “ a debt I have paid off to this country. . . . I’m very fond of America as a country that has welcomed so many people from different parts of the world without asking questions.”