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In the early 20th century, there was a lot of curiosity -- both scientific and not -- about things like ghosts, the possibility of psychic powers, and nature spirits, or fairies. Even someone seemingly as logically rigorous as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, might believe in fairies and spirits.

It was also a time when photography was beginning to reach a more common audience, thanks to the invention of smaller and more portable cameras.

So when two teenaged girls from a small town in Yorkshire, England took photographs of fairies, it was a sensation, but not considered entirely implausible.

Publication Details

• Full Title:The Fairy Ring or Elsie and Frances Fool the World (a true story)
• Author: Mary Losure
• Publisher: Candlewick Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• ISBN: 978-0-7636-5670-6

Photographing Fairies

Around the time of World War I, a girl named Frances moved to Yorkshire with her mother while her father went off to war. They moved in with relatives, an aunt and uncle and cousin Elsie. Though Elsie was some years older than Frances, the two got along well, and would spend a lot of time together at the "beck" (stream or creek) behind the house. It was there that the two girls claimed to see fairies.

Elsie and Frances -- Frances especially, who was the first to say she saw fairies -- were teased about their sightings by their parents. Neither girl liked to be teased, so they hatched a plan to get back at the adults. Elsie, who was good with watercolors, painted some fairy images.

The girls placed the cutouts near the beck, and photographed them.

Probably nothing would have come of the girls' revenge, but spiritualism was popular at the time, and Elsie's mother attended a lecture about nature spirits and mentioned that her daughter and niece had -- perhaps -- photographed one. From there the whole thing steamrollered into a sensation with none other that Sir A.C. Doyle coming out in favor of the existence of fairies.

Do You Believe?

Overall, I enjoyed this treatment of what are known as the Cottingley Fairies (after the village where Elsie and Frances lived), but I do have some criticisms. First, and perhaps most nit-picky, is that no dates are mentioned until well into the book, so a young reader's only clue about when this all happened is mention of WWI. Perhaps some readers would be scared off by too many dates, but a better indication would have been nice.

I also found it a bit problematic that the actual existence of fairies seems to be taken for granted in the book. The author is careful to say that Frances saw fairies, even though the photographs were made with paper cut-outs painted by Elsie. I wouldn't have minded if it was said that Frances insisted she saw fairies, or even that she believed she saw them, but it's not worded that way.

Losure also sometimes seemed to include a lot of extra detail not really necessary to the story, such as what the girls were wearing and how they did their hair. It's certainly nice background detail, but the book is quite slender as it is, and I'd rather have a little bit of the skeptical point of view regarding fairies instead of fashion information.

The lack of critical viewpoint seems especially problematic when the last photograph the girls took is mentioned. It's the image often called the "Fairy Bower," and the one some people still argue today is a genuine fairy photograph. However, to anyone familiar with photography, the image looks like a simple double exposure -- the plate exposed once to photograph another paper fairy, once one to photograph grass. It's entirely possible (probable, even) that the double exposure was accidental, but that doesn't make it a genuine fairy photograph.

Pretty

Candlewick press is well-known for the attractive books they produce, and The Fairy Ring is no exception. It's a pleasing small size, with a green cloth cover and a green-hued dustjacket and endpapers (green being the fairies' color). The typography is attractive and the narrative easily distinguished from quoted letters, of which there are several.

The only downside of the book's physical appearance is that the lovely cream paper it's printed on tends to make the images reproduced look a bit murky. It's hard to get crisp pictures without bright white paper to allow bright white highlights. However, I did appreciate the inclusion of all of the Cottingley Fairy photographs as well as other relevant images -- despite having studied the Cottingley Fairies, there were some of Elsie's paintings that I hadn't seen before.

More For The Young

Although I found this book on a list of recommended young adult non-fiction, it really seems aimed more at younger readers. As such, I'd suggest it for younger teens and tweens, though an older teen really interested in the subject matter would probably enjoy The Fairy Ring, too.

More sophisticated readers might want to try The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper, published in 1997, instead. Cooper became good friends with Elsie and Frances in their later years, so his account is just as biased as Losure's, but he does cover the material in greater depth.

Both The Fairy Ring and The Case of the Cottingley Fairies would be best paired with a more skeptical account (such as this one from the Museum of Hoaxes). I don't mind who believes in fairies (and I have a bit of a weakness for them, myself), but I'd like to see all the evidence for both sides presented so intelligent teens get all the information. And, as they say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."



Disclosure: A review copy was purchased by the reviewer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.