Miss M. the narrator of these fictional memoirs is a diminutive young womanthough just how diminutive the author never says with a passion for shellsfossils fli... » 

Miss M. the narrator of these fictional memoirs is a diminutive young womanthough just how diminutive the author never says with a passion for shellsfossils flints butterflies and stuffed animals. Miss M. tells of her earlylife as a dreamy orphan and in particular of her tempestuous twentieth year in which she falls in love with a beautiful and ambitious fullsized womanand is courted by a male dwarf. Concluding that she must choose either tosimply tolerate her difference or grow callous to it Miss M. resolves tobecome independent by offering herself up as a spectacle in a circus.After along period of neglect de la Mare may be beginning to be seen as the remarkablewriter that he is. John Bayley The New York Review of Books «