Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (review)

Abstract

If the number of fairy books and fairy paraphernalia I have encountered in books, stores, and malls since agreeing to do this review are any indication, Carole Silver has hit upon a subject as timely and as significant for our own culture as for the Victorians. The persistence of fascination with fairy and elfin lore in a world of "tired post-moderns" (210) is, in fact, the final focus of this book's last chapter, in which the author wryly notes that "the fairies have been leaving England since the fourteenth century" (185), before concluding that "their farewell is perpetual": "the 'hidden people'" are "always leaving us yet never gone" (9, 212). It is a parting observation that, come to think of it, sounds strikingly similar to those now also made about the persistence of postmodernism itself, likewise recently described as "something that keeps on dying" in a post-postmodern moment ("Essays into the Imagetext: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell" Mosaic 33.2 [2000] 6).