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Writing with her usual spiky language and rich immediacy of detail, she reinvigorated a genre that had long been ridiculed as “relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like ‘Prithee,’” as the novelist Jonathan Lee wrote in a recent essay.

Prithee, pass under the faux pirate ship entrance gate and be greeted by a crush of costumed characters.

Prithee, dear Reader, and fetch me a more exquisite anthology this holiday season?

Or, rather, it has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like “Prithee!” while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell.

Henny Youngman: Take mine too, prithee.