Memoirs of a Midget

Miss M., the narrator of these fictional memoirs, is a tiny young woman with a passion for shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, and stuffed animals. Miss M. tells of her early life as a dreamy orphan and, in particular, of her tempestuous twentieth year in which she falls in love with a beautiful and ambitious full-sized woman and is courted by a male dwarf. Concluding that she must choose either to simply tolerate her difference or grow callous to it, Miss M. resolves to become independent by offering herself up as a spectacle in a circus.[Walter de la Mare wrote numerous novels, short stories, essays, and poems. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Memoirs of a Midget.]