White - at this point, known primarily for a book with an extremely literal title, The Sword in the Stone - chose to go this route. Looking back on the book, it's not that hard to interpret, so it's a bit of a mystery why T.H.

Mundane Made Awesome: Maria's dialogue sometimes falls into this, being a bookish child without much social contact.Mistress Masham's Repose is the slightly off-putting title of a slightly askew book, choosing to highlight its most important setting rather than its characters, any aspect of its plot, or its unusual tone.

They have some appropriately-scaled livestock, but mostly they improvise.

Mouse World: The Lilliputians manage to live in one.

Masquerade: The Lilliputians are the only fantastical element in the book, but the heroes end up constructing a miniature masquerade around them, as they don't believe they'd get a fair hearing if their story was made public.

Not only does he want to take the Lilliputians away (which could possibly be excused as merely looking after Maria's financial interests), but he's also actively embezzling money from her estate and plotting to disinherit her.

Horse of a Different Color: The Lilliputians ride rats, as none of their horses made it out of Lilliput.

Eccentric Mentor / Genius Ditz: The Professor is quite good at medieval Latin as well as being the moral centerpiece of the book, but he epitomizes the Absentminded Professor stereotype.

Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Cook to the Professor.

Big Fancy House: Malplaquet Manor is certainly big, and it used to be fancy, but the family's been broke for the last few centuries so it's falling apart.

Antiquated Linguistics: The Lilliputians speak English this way, in a nod to their 18th-century origins (and because they haven't had much human contact since shortly after they came to England).

She then has to figure out how to stop her guardians from getting rich by selling them to circuses. Maria, the young orphan heiress to a sprawling English estate, runs across a colony of exiled Lilliputians while exploring its grounds. It is set in the same world as Gulliver's Travels but in the present day at the time of writing (1946). White, best known for writing The Once and Future King.

Mistress Masham's Repose is a children's novel by T.

Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White