Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
You see – no, you do not, but I see – such curious faces: and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking close into your face, as if they were searching for someone – who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him.
There was an enormous fascination with fairies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which popularised depictions of benevolent, butterfly-winged beings and glittering pantomime figures. But the fae have always had a more sinister side. Taking inspiration from folk tales and medieval legends, the works of weird tale and ghost story writers such as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Angela Carter and Charlotte Riddell show that fairies, goblins and other supernatural entities could be something far more unsettling.
Delving into a frightening realm of otherworldly creatures from banshees to changelings, this new collection of stories revives and revels in the fearsome power of the fairy folk.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780712354301 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | British Library Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2022 |
| Series: | British Library Hardback Classics |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 366,319 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION In December 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published an article in The Strand Magazine recounting his discovery of photographs taken by two young girls from Yorkshire, who claimed they had taken pictures of fairies by Cottingley Beck during the summer of 1917. “Should the incidents here narrated … hold their own against the criticism which they will excite,” he wrote, “it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought.” His story generated international attention, becoming a lightning rod for discussions about truth, photographic trickery, childhood, postwar grief, spiritualism, the supernatural, and belief versus scientific rationalism, hinging on a single question: do you believe in fairies? The Spiritualist Conan Doyle came to believe wholeheartedly in the photographs, which he had acquired from leading Theosophist Edward L. Gardner. In September 1922 he published a book endorsing their authenticity, The Coming of the Fairies, followed three months later by The Case for Spirit Photography, an energetic defence of medium William Hope. His suggestion that any anomalies in the fairies’ shadows could be explained by “ectoplasm [that] has a faint luminosity of its own” placed them on a continuum with other spirit entities, now seemingly capable of being captured on film. But fairies were not ghosts, he conjectured; they might, for instance, be part insect. Comparing the different species he observed in the photographs, Conan Doyle noted that “the elves are a compound of the human and the butterfly, while the gnome has more of the moth”. But they ultimately remained a mystery: “I must confess”, he concluded, “that after months of thought I am unable to get the true bearings of … these little folk who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us.” A hundred years later, the Cottingley Fairies are usually remembered as one of the most famous hoaxes in photographic history, with the creator of Sherlock Holmes hoodwinked by a practical joke that got out of hand. But the story isn’t quite so straightforward. The girls themselves, sixteen-yearold Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, stuck to their story until the 1980s, when as older women they admitted the fairies had been staged with paper cut-outs and hatpins. Yet until she died, Frances maintained that the fifth and final image they had taken was genuine. A paranormal researcher named Joe Cooper, who had followed the case for many years and had initially believed in the photographs himself, broke the news of the hoax in the December 1982 issue of Unexplained and published his own book about the case in 1990, but was devastated to learn that the pictures had been faked.1 Conan Doyle’s reputation certainly suffered as a result of his involvement; a mocking Punch cartoon from the time shows him with his head in the clouds while chained to a disapproving Sherlock Holmes. But the intensity of public debate following his publication of the photographs says a good deal about a collective desire to believe in the supernatural—particularly for a world reeling from the mass deaths of World War I—and also tapped into a much older uneasiness as to what fairies might be. Were they flimsy butterfly-winged creatures fluttering within the pages of children’s books, or something altogether more ambiguous, hovering in the shadows? Today, many popular images of fairies fall into the first category, from tinsel-skirted figures on Christmas trees to the Technicolor stardust of Disney magical helpers like Tinker Bell, the Blue Fairy, and Sleeping Beauty’s Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. Like fairy tales themselves (the term coined by writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy in 1697 for the title of her first collection Les contes des fées, literally “tales about fairies”), our perceptions of fairies have been shaped by developments in the children’s book and entertainment industry over the last century, perhaps exemplified by J.M. Barrie’s appeal to the audience to save Tinker Bell’s life by believing in fairies in his 1904 play Peter Pan. But historically, fairies have always been much more unpredictable and formidable figures—and, as can be seen from the Barrie story in this book, even the most whimsical-seeming aspects of Peter Pan have a darker side. Associations between fairies and the dead go back a long way. In many folklore traditions, fairies are described as coming from the otherworld, which is often also an underworld. The Irish term for fairies, sídhe (modern Irish sí), literally means “earthen mound”, and there are many local legends of fairy realms reached through openings in rocks or hills. Other stories explicitly link fairies to the souls of the departed. They appear in several accounts of Scottish witch trials, where the borders between ghosts and fairies become blurred; Katherine Jonesdochter, an Orkney woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, was charged, among other things, with “haunting and seeing the trowis [fairies] rise out of the kirkyard”.2 A medieval retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, preserved in fourteenth-century Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, recasts their journey to Hades as fairy abduction: Orfeo’s wife is stolen by the fairy king and taken through a rock three miles deep to a “castel [as] clere and schine as cristal”, and only by playing the harp is he able to rescue her from this deceptively glittering underland.3 Fairies appear to have acquired insect wings in the eighteenth century—appearing in Thomas Stothard’s 1798 illustrations to Pope’s The Rape of the Lock—giving them further associations with the souls of the dead, which are linked with butterflies or moths in numerous cultures.