Mrs. Phelps

Mrs. Phelps, the librarian at the Village Library, becomes the first adult outside Matilda Wormwood’s family to take a sustained interest in her intellectual life. Her importance lies less in directing Matilda’s reading than in making room for it: she notices the child, recognizes the scale of her ability, and gives her access to books without trying to narrow her ambitions.

Identity and First Encounter

Mrs. Phelps meets Matilda after the child’s father refuses to buy her a book. Matilda is left alone at home most afternoons: her older brother is at school, her father is at work, and her mother spends five afternoons a week playing bingo in town, twelve kilometers away. On the afternoon after that refusal, Matilda walks by herself to the library and asks permission to sit and read. Mrs. Phelps is surprised that such a small child has arrived without a parent, but allows her to stay.

Their first exchange establishes both the difference in their ages and the respect that will shape their relationship. Mrs. Phelps offers to choose a children’s book with plenty of pictures; Matilda politely declines, preferring to choose for herself. The offer is kindly meant, but it assumes that a very young reader needs pictures and an adult guide. Matilda’s answer quietly unsettles that assumption.

Recognizing Matilda’s Ability

Once Matilda begins visiting regularly, Mrs. Phelps watches her for several weeks. She sees that the child is not merely looking at illustrations: when Matilda says she has finished all the children’s books, Mrs. Phelps initially asks whether she means that she has looked at all the pictures. Matilda confirms that she has read the words as well. The distinction turns a seemingly ordinary report into evidence of an extraordinary reading pace and comprehension.

Matilda is four years and three months old. When Mrs. Phelps asks what she has liked, Matilda identifies The Secret Garden as her favorite, describing its mysteries: the room behind the closed door and the garden beyond the high wall. Mrs. Phelps is astonished. Her response registers the gulf between the child’s age and the literary attention she brings to a book: Matilda has not simply consumed pages, but followed the book’s secrets and found its imaginative appeal.

The same pattern becomes still clearer when Matilda finishes Great Expectations, an edition of 411 pages, in less than a week. She tells Mrs. Phelps she loved it and asks whether Dickens wrote other books. Mrs. Phelps, herself taken aback, offers to find another. Over the next six months, Matilda reads further books under the librarian’s watchful, sympathetic eye. Mrs. Phelps is therefore both witness to Matilda’s precocity and the person to whom Matilda can report what she has read.

Guidance and Access to Books

Mrs. Phelps does not treat Matilda’s reading as a test she must pass. When a book contains parts the child does not understand, she advises her not to worry, but to sit with the words and let them wash over her like music. The advice makes room for reading as an experience as well as a task: understanding need not be complete before a book can give pleasure. It also differs from the dismissive response Matilda encounters at home, where her desire for a book is rejected in favor of the family television.

A practical change in the librarian’s help expands Matilda’s freedom. Mrs. Phelps explains that library books can be borrowed and taken home for two weeks; she will record each selection, and Matilda may borrow more than one. Matilda had not known this was possible. The arrangement turns the library from a place she must visit for each reading session into a continuing source of books she can carry into her own life.

Afterward, Matilda goes to the library once a week to return old books and collect new ones. The librarian’s explanation makes this routine possible, while leaving the choice of reading to Matilda. That balance is characteristic of Mrs. Phelps’s role: she provides access and encouragement, not a prescribed course of study.

Relationship and Narrative Significance

Mrs. Phelps’s concern is not unqualified. She wonders whether Matilda can safely walk alone along the busy main road and cross it, but decides not to interfere. The hesitation shows that she recognizes a real risk in the child’s independence even as she permits the visits to continue. Her care remains restrained rather than parental: she observes, worries, and offers help, but the evidence does not show her taking charge of Matilda’s home circumstances.

Once Matilda can borrow books, her small bedroom becomes her reading room. She spends nearly every afternoon there, often with warm chocolate beside her. Too short to reach everything in the kitchen, she fetches a small box from the scullery to stand on; she heats milk in a pan on the stove and adds cocoa, sometimes making Ovomaltine instead. Mrs. Phelps does not share these private reading hours, but the lending system she explained enables them. In the quiet of the otherwise empty house, books carry Matilda across the world: she sails with Joseph Conrad, goes to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and travels to India with Rudyard Kipling, all from her small room in an English village.

Mrs. Phelps’s narrative function is thus concrete and quietly consequential. Matilda’s family fails to meet her appetite for books, while the librarian recognizes it and helps sustain it. She does not create Matilda’s ability; she takes that ability seriously enough to open the library’s shelves and lending system to her. The result is a relationship built on attention and access, in which a modest offer of permission becomes the basis for Matilda’s expansive life as a reader.