Mistress Masham’s Repose is the story of Maria, a 10-year-old orphan who lives on her huge, dilapidated ancestral estate in England with her abusive governess, Miss Brown. The local vicar, Mr Hater, is Maria’s cruel guardian. The only other tenants of the estate are the old cook, Mrs. Noakes, who lives in the kitchen, and the professor, an elderly and destitute scholar living in a small cottage in the ridings.

 

Neglected, Maria often takes advantage of Miss Brown’s frequent headaches to go on adventures. One such excursion takes her to a small ornamental island, called Mistress Masham’s Repose, in the middle of one of the lakes in the grounds of the palace. There she discovers a colony of miniature people; Lilliputians, in fact, who were accidentally allowed to escape onto the estate many years before by an associate of Lemuel Gulliver (thus the story can be said to be a sequel to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).

 

From there the story deals with Maria’s struggles with the knowledge of this discovery. She confides this knowledge only with the professor (Maria’s only friend beside the cook). He provides her with moral advice, but Maria must decide for herself how she will handle her secret. She visits the people whenever she can, swearing to them that their safety is secure. But, being only ten years of age, Maria cannot resist the temptation to treat them all like dolls. So it is that the people eventually dread her visits, which only serve to dehumanize and humiliate them.

 

Maria gets further and further carried away until she eventually injures one of the Lilliputians in a toy airplane. Having had enough, the people decide to banish her from their ‘‘Isle of Repose’’. So Maria goes, having learned a painful but valuable lesson.

 

Meanwhile, Miss Brown and Mr Hater are conspiring to steal Maria’s family fortune by altering a legal document, if they can find it, which they believe to be somewhere in the house. Eventually this evil pair discover the Lilliputians when, thinking that Maria is being held prisoner in her room, the little people climb in the window with peace offerings. In the ensuing confusion, one of the people is caught. This turns Maria’s guardians’ attention toward finding out, at all costs, where they can find the rest of the little people; intending to sell them and become millionaires.

 

Now Maria really is being held prisoner. This ignites the concern of the cook, who visits the professor to tell him of her suspicions...