Held on the first Thursday of the month, the Folger’s virtual book club is free and open to all. To spark discussion, speakers provide historical context, throw in trivia, and speak to relevant items from the library collection in a brief presentation to participants before small-group discussion begins.
Here, we revisit the conversation between Leah Thomas, Public Humanities Program Manager for Folger Institute, and author Heather Fawcett. Discussion questions for the novel can be found here.
Leah Thomas (Public Humanities Program Manager, Folger Institute): We’re so, so thrilled to have Heather Fawcett here with us to discuss this month’s pick, her book, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies. The Emily Wilde series brings together two of our favorite things here at the Folger: meticulous research, complete with footnotes and citations, and masterful storytelling, full of relatable characters who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.
We have no shortage of fairies, strange creatures, or spirits in and around the Folger Shakespeare Library. We see them in Shakespeare’s works, often as tricksters, agents of mischief bringing along the plot. Some of the most famous of Shakespeare’s fairies also adorn the Folger building itself, such as our Puck Fountain and Titania here in one of our bas reliefs on the side of the building.
And of course, they come to life in all their varied glory on the Folger stage, in productions such as Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest.
Early modern fairies have also found their home in our collection. We have spells for summoning them by name and binding them, sometimes for nefarious reasons. We have witch-hunting reference images of animal-like fairies serving as familiar spirits, and a grimoire full of esoteric knowledge. Heather, what is it that you love about these themes and that have made them so consistent in your writing?
Heather Fawcett, author Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries: Generally, my work is informed by the books that I read when I was younger. Growing up, I read a lot of fantasy. I was definitely a bit of a Tolkien geek when I was a kid. I loved high fantasy especially, so stories of fairies, elves, dragons. But I also read a little classic literature. I think it was my dad who got me started on Charles Dickens, George Elliott, and those kinds of writers.
LT: And that seemed to carry on into your formal education?
HF: For my undergrad, I did a double major in English lit and archaeology. And then I went on to do a master’s in English lit specifically where I did again focus a lot on the kind of Victorian writers like Dickens, Jane Austen to a certain extent, the Brontë sisters. Writers with a kind of ornate style, because that’s what I’ve always loved to read.
In terms of archaeology, that instilled a love of research. I was so passionate about archaeology that sometimes when I was researching, it would almost feel like play. I got to sort of play around in these ancient worlds that I had been fascinated by.
LT: I love that idea of research feeling like play. I think a lot of other scholars who have been at the Folger would probably agree with you. Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose academia as a framework for the series? And why a fieldwork journal?
HF: I was primarily inspired by Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark, which is one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time. She also has a short story collection called The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which I also recommend if anyone hasn’t read that one. It’s a similar type of structure with a very kind of academic framework. I find that having that kind of scholarly perspective creates a little bit of a distance, and it also kind of creates this really interesting lens that you don’t always see in fantasy. If a character is really enmeshed in the fantasy world, it can be a little bit alienating for the reader. It can be easier for them to put themselves in the shoes of an academic who is outside the world that they’re studying and trying to comprehend it at the same time as the reader is.
In terms of the journal structure, I can’t really claim that I had this sort of intellectual motive behind that. That was actually completely accidental. I started writing the first book and I was initially just going to write sort of first person POV, which I’ve done in many of my books before. But I got about a page or two in, and I just realized that it was a journal and that this was not only narrated by a scholar, but it was a scholar who was writing a record that she was keeping for academic purposes of her expedition there. I think it worked out well. However, because of that, the epistolary structure is a really difficult one to work with, and I found it way more challenging.
LT: That’s interesting, and I completely feel that when I see her writing the question marks for the date, for example, you get that feeling of confusion inside your own head as well, or when Wendell jumps in and writes in her journal instead. I find those moments really charming.
Let’s talk about the footnotes because those are so delightful. They are really extensive. Some of them are very long. And this has been a burning question for me as I’ve been reading your books over the past years–are any of them real sources? Or did you create an entire historiography for the series and for the world?
HF: None of them are real. I’ll look at, for example, some of the papers that have been recently published, and I find myself getting ideas in terms of how to structure the kind of titles of these journals and of the articles and the content as well. That’s a bit of a hack that I’ve used. As a fantasy author, I think we all have a kind of innate gravitation towards the info dump. We all just want to talk about our world. You could skip them, I suppose, but I don’t necessarily recommend it because there’s some foreshadowing and whatnot in those footnotes. But if you want to, you can. But if you want more of that texture, you can read the footnotes and you can get that there.
LT: Returning to the fantasy element, fairies themselves obviously have a broad appeal. They’re having a moment in today’s world, but they’ve been popular from pre-modern stories and folklore to, of course, Shakespeare’s plays and your own work today. What is this broad appeal? And as with the infamous Wendell, why do we always want to fall in love with fairies?
HF: I think it’s largely because they are very human in some ways, but they’re also alien. And they have an entirely different moral code to ours. In Emily’s world, I think that sometimes it’s implied that they don’t have morals. They do, they’re just completely different from ours. It’s based on prioritizing people and things that are near to them rather than a kind of generalized view of morality, which I think is interesting. But in that kind of contrast and contradiction, in some ways they are, of course, very human. They’re capable of things like jealousy and capriciousness and very kind of human things like grudges and whatnot. And at the same time, they’re very powerful and they’re deeply rooted in nature.
LT: We have these throughlines with how people are fascinated with fairies, but the way that we think of them and imagine them has also changed quite a bit over time. How would you say that the fairies, the “Folk” of Emily Wilde’s world compare the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or some of the Shakespearean fairies?
HF: The stories that were passed down for generations, hundreds of years ago, when fairies were very real, I think that that’s something that we often overlook in the modern world. We think about fairies as just for fantasy. But people genuinely believed in these creatures. They genuinely believed that they were capable of the feats of magic and revenge and whatnot that we see in the stories. You see that in Shakespeare. I really like how Titania and Oberon are depicted as very sort of “mortal” in the kinds of arguments and sort of petty grudge-holding that they have. But then they’re also difficult to interpret. That is very close to the folkloric tradition.
LT: Emily Wilde is very dedicated to her dryadology research, sometimes obsessively so. Tell us about your own research on fairy folklore.
HF: The idea came to me while I was researching a different, middle grade book which I never ended up writing. I was flipping through an encyclopedia of fairies by Catherine Briggs, who was a folklorist. It’s a compendium of fairy folklore from Western Europe, primarily the British Isles. In flipping through that I had the idea of “how fascinating would it have been to be a scholar in that world?”
Some of the fairies that I mentioned in Emily Wilde are inspired by and might have the same name as fairies from that book. But I’ve given them a completely different character and maybe mushed a couple of them together or just dug around in my own brain to come up with how I want to depict them. Research is a bit more like playing in a sandbox for me than it is about coming up with a list of facts and references.
Similarly, I read a really interesting article about this kind of industrial era fascination (specific to England) around fairies where there was almost this belief at that point in history that fairies were departing because of industrialization. People were seeing this transformation in the countryside and thought that fairies had to be documented before they disappeared.
LT: Research is fun. I think looking from the outside in, you often just see researchers nose down and really serious. But when researchers get together more casually, they’re going to have a great time talking about everything that they’re doing because it is fun.
HF: Exactly.
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