Matilda (novel)

Matilda is a children's novel written by British writer Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake. It was published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape. The story features Matilda Wormwood, a precocious child with an uncaring mother and father, and her time in school run by the tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull. The book has been adapted in various media, including an audio reading by actress Kate Winslet; a 1996 feature film Matilda directed by Danny DeVito; a two-part BBC Radio 4 programme; and a 2010–2011 musical Matilda the Musical which ran on the West End in London, Broadway in New York, and around the world. A film adaptation of the musical, Matilda the Musical, was released in 2022. In 2003, Matilda was listed at number 74 in The Big Read, a BBC survey of the British public of the top 200 novels of all time. In 2012, Matilda was ranked number 30 among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a US monthly. Time magazine named Matilda in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time. In 2012, Matilda Wormwood appeared on a Royal Mail commemorative postage stamp. In a small Buckinghamshire village forty minutes by bus away from Reading and 8 miles from Aylesbury, Matilda Wormwood is born to Mr and Mrs Wormwood. She immediately shows amazing precocity, learning to speak at age one and to read at age three and a half, perusing all the children's books in the library by the age of four and three months and moving on to longer classics such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. However, her parents emotionally abuse her and completely refuse to acknowledge her abilities; to keep from getting frustrated, Matilda finds herself forced to pull pranks on them, such as gluing her father's hat to his head, sticking a parrot in the chimney to simulate a burglar or ghost, and bleaching her father's hair with peroxide. At the age of five and a half, Matilda enters school and befriends her teacher Jennifer Honey, who is astonished by her intellectual abilities.