Between 1921 and 1924, many of Britain and Ireland's most significant writers contributed handwritten books to the miniature library of Queen Mary's Dolls' House, a model miniature royal home designed to show off the best of art, craft and manufacturing. The collection of tiny manuscripts for the doll library was organised by Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who worked alongside the writer E.V. Lucas.

F. Tennyson Jesse was the pseudonym of Fryniwyd (Wynifried) Jesse, a great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although she trained as an artist, she became a successful writer with a broad range, publishing novels, plays, books on criminology and a history of Burma (now Myanmar). By 1922, when she was asked to contribute to the miniature library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, she had completed The Sword of Deborah, her book about the women’s army, written following her work as a war correspondent on the Belgian Front during the First World War. She was also dealing with a horrific injury to her hand, after having put it into an aeroplane’s spinning propeller while waving to people watching her flight from the ground. She mentions this in her letter sending her miniature manuscript to Princess Marie Louise, telling her that her work on it had taken longer than she had hoped, as her damaged right hand meant she could only do a little at a time.

In her manuscript, My Town, Jesse lovingly invokes the imagined childhood fantasy town of her childhood, ‘a place of pointed turrets and latticed windows’ set on a hill, which she illustrates in a colourful miniature painting on the frontispiece, opposite her title page. Her artistic background is also seen in the way her text is carefully laid out, with decorated initial letters and roses drawn at the beginning and end. The ‘fanciful essay’, as she termed it in a letter to Princess Marie Louise, was written specially for the Dolls’ House and not published elsewhere.

The tiny handwritten, hand-painted book, only 4 cm high, was bound in vellum by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, with gold-tooled lettering on the spine, a single gold border on the covers and a crowned ‘MR’ monogram on the upper cover.