Memoirs of a Midget

Miss M. is a grown woman of extraordinarily small stature, and Walter de la Mare tells her whole life in her own precise, watchful voice. Orphaned at twenty and left to fend for herself, she moves through an ordinary English world scaled all wrong for her body, treated by turns as a curiosity, a pet, and a confidante. She falls hard for the beautiful, careless Fanny Bowater, whose schemes pull the story toward heartbreak. De la Mare, better known as a poet, renders her inner life with such tenderness that her smallness stops being a device and becomes a way of seeing loneliness plainly. The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1921. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.