Miss M., a pretty and diminutive young woman with a passion for shells, fossils, flints, butterflies and stuffed animals, struggles to deal with her isolation from the rest of society due to her extraordinarily small size. When her father dies, she must make her own way in a world that treats her as an entertaining curiosity, a momentary diversion from the game of making ones way up the social ladder. An elegiac, misanthropic, sometimes perverse study of isolation, de la Mare's prize-winning classic seduces by its gentle charm and elegant prose.