Mary Gulliver was born to an Edinburgh hosier and his strictly Presbyterian wife. Brought up on a diet of duty and modesty, by the time she is sixteen she has been married off to physician Lemuel Gulliver, a stiff, charmless academic. Mary, as yet an innocent, sees marriage to Lemuel as an opportunity to improve herself, but is quickly reminded that intellectual curiosity in a woman is shameful - and, likewise, that intimations of sexual desire are immodest and abhorrent. So the attractively rounded, ripe young Mary Gulliver concentrates her mind wholeheartedly on the role of dutiful wife.
When her husband returns deranged from his now infamous travels, only to set off again for the South Seas, Mary feels it incumbent upon her to follow him - but Mary's adventures will be uniquely her own: she will find sexual release on the island of Lilliput due to the extraordinary efforts of a group of debauched Lilliputian males; she will witness the tender love of a strappingly handsome black sailor for a diminutive Lilliputian peasant girl; she will attempt to stifle her love for an eccentric French botanist, with whom she ultimately finds sexual love and intellectual freedom, and so finally escaping the bonds of her sterile marriage.
Polished, playful and pure entertainment 'The Mistress of Lilliput' expounds hilariously on the nature of men and women, the rational v the irrational, and is the modern woman's answer to centuries of chauvinism on all fronts.
