Can 'The Favorite's' Oscar-win bring back attention to TH White and his 'Mistress Masham’s Repose'?

Before this year’s Oscar season, few people knew of Abigail Masham, the real historical character on whom the titular role in 'The Favourite' was based. One of the few places she featured was in the title of a much-loved children’s novel written by the Bombay-born fantasy writer TH White.

Olivia Colman won the Best Actress award for playing Queen Anne, during whose reign the real Abigail Masham enjoyed considerable power, but when the Queen died in 1714 she retired into the obscurity of history, which has rarely lifted, until 'The Favourite' was made.

One exception was TH White’s children’s fantasy novel 'Mistress Masham’s Repose' (1946), though even here she has only a titular presence. The novel is set after World War II in a vast English estate called Malplaquet originally built in Queen Anne’s time. It has a lake with an island on a domed building had served as a picnic spot where Mistress Masham “had sat in silks and laces, in the summer weather drinking tay (tea).”


White’s idea in the book is that Jonathan Swift’s 'Gulliver’s Travels' described real events. Swift was Gulliver and when he returned from Lilliput he brought a group of its diminutive inhabitants with him, and left them in Malplaquet. They found refuge on the island, living in the building, now known as Mistress Masham’s Repose, undetected till modern times.

The estate meanwhile has fallen to ruin and the aristocratic family that owned has now come down to just one 10-year-old girl called Maria. She lives in a mansion with “365 windows, all broken by six” along with her cruel governess, with just a friendly cook and an eccentric old scholar called the Professor as an informal mentor.

And then one day, Maria discovers the Lilliputians and the book unfolds in a highspirited mix of the genres of oppressed-but-secretly-rich orphan and all those books like 'The Borrowers' and 'The Indian in the Cupboard' that combine big and tiny people.

It is a wonderful story and once was set to become a film itself. Walt Disney liked the idea, possibly because White had written 'The Sword in the Stone', the novel about the boyhood of King Arthur which his company made into a successful animated film in 1963. But after Disney died in 1966 the project was shelved.

White himself then fell into literary obscurity. He had died in 1964, but perhaps the problem was, as Christopher Fowler writes in 'The Book of Forgotten Authors' he would be far better remembered had he been born a little later, rather than in 1906.” He was too young to be part of the first generation of classic fantasy writers, like JRR Tolkein and CS Lewis, but not quite part of the postwar growth in the genre.

Perhaps it wasn’t just the year, but where he was born too – in Bombay, in a decidedly unliterary part of the British Raj world. White’s father, Garrick Hanbury White, worked in the Indian police service, in a variety of locations in Western and Central India. The Times of India (ToI) reported the wedding of his parents on October 4, 1904 with a full column and a half describing the bride’s dress and the presents they received, but ended by saying “they left for Nandubar, Khandeish by the 11.30 train from Byculla.”

In the hot and dusty locations where his father worked marriages rapidly strained and that happened with his parents. His father became an alcoholic, as many in his profession did, and his mother grew distant after their son was born. White’s memories of India included the lizards and fireworks that would have fascinated a child, but also fights between his parents.

“I am told that my father and mother were to be found wrestling with a pistol, each claiming that he or she was going to shoot the other and himself or herself, but in any case beginning with me,” he once wrote. (In October 1910 ToI reported that Mr. GH White had won the prize for revolver shooting at the Poona Police week). It was a relief when his parents divorced when he was 14 and the young White never seems to have returned to India.

White immersed himself in the English countryside and English history. His college thesis was on the legends of King Arthur collected by Thomas Mallory and he wrote a popular book about living in the country. In time he combined these interests with idiosyncratic style, retelling the Arthur legend in a series of four novels with modern language and characterisations, but set in a kind of timeless evocation of England.

It has proven very influential. JK Rowling has admitted her 'Harry Potter' books were influenced by White – Merlin in 'The Sword in the Stone' is a model for Albus Dumbledore (as is the Professor in 'Mistress Masham’s Repose'). Neil Gaiman once responded to a suggestion that Rowling had plagiarised him by saying, “I thought we were both just stealing from TH White.”


Helen McDonald’s very successful 'H is For Hawk', which is part of a boom in writing on nature, combines a personal memoir of grief with an account of trying to train a hawk. It draws heavily on White’s account of attempting the same, to the extent that it is almost a biography of him. White’s books have also ensured the continuing popularity of the Arthur stories. They inspired the musical and film 'Camelot', and their style of retelling legends in a modern style can be seen in popular TV series like 'Merlin'.

Like most of White’s 'Mistress Masham’s Repose' went out of print for a while, but it has been brought out again, benefitting from the general attention brought on White’s works by the success of all those it influenced. Perhaps this, combined with the attention brought to Abigail Masham thanks to 'The Favourite' might help bring attention to this utterly charming book and perhaps even push Disney to consider again making it into a film.