Matilda

Roald Dahl's Matilda was published by Jonathan Cape in 1988, near the end of his career and after the books that had made him famous among children and controversial among adults. The story came from a household that reads to children and a school that punishes them: the library card, the stolen library book and the terrifying headmistress are the whole furniture of the novel, and Quentin Blake's illustrations have been attached to it since the first edition.

Matilda keeps the reader inside a child's view of adults. Mr and Mrs Wormwood are drawn as comic and selfish rather than simply cruel, and the account of their contempt for their daughter is one of the few things in Dahl that is played straight. Miss Trunchbull is the pure monster of the book: a headmistress who runs a school like a training camp and who describes the children she teaches as vermin. Against both of them Dahl sets the one adult in the school who recognises what Matilda is, and the two of them form the alliance the ending depends on.

The novel's afterlife has been unusually large: an audio version read by Kate Winslet, a 1996 film directed by Danny DeVito, a West End and Broadway musical that opened in 2010 and 2011, and a film of that musical in 2022. Matilda has appeared on British postage stamps and in reader surveys of the best children's books, and it is the Dahl novel most often taught alongside his shorter books.