Mistress Masham's Repose - Softcover

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.”

"It is literate, graceful and malicious...altogether a really charming contrivance."
— Diana Trilling

"A masterpiece of narration, literary ingenuity, humor and satire. Mr. White, on the basis of this book, deserves to be mentioned in the company of Evelyn Waugh, C. S. Lewis, and George Orwell as one of the few fortunate possessors of a splendid prose style."
— Commonweal

"Readers of earlier books by T.H. White (The Sword in the Stone, Witch in the Wood, The Ill-made Knight) can expect the able recreation of period decor, the faculty of transmuting accepted literature into new life, elements of very human humor."
— Kirkus Reviews

"The action is shot through with humor, and the Lilliputians, with their eighteenth-century manner of speech and dress, are characters not soon forgotten."
— The Horn Book

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