![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Fairies
Lud-In-The-Mist reads much better after you've read Susannah Clarke. I wish I'd known this in 1974 when I first read it, though it wouldn't have helped because back then Susannah Clarke was 15. 'In 30 years you'll be in a position to appreciate what this book is on about' isn't much comfort except in L-space.
Yes, I know the literary tradition works the other way, and I'm almost sure that Kingsley contributed to the nastiness of Clarke's fairies as well. But as it is, having seen the notion writ large in Jonathan Strange, I can now deal with it written small in Lud-In-The-Mist.
(I need a-- whatever: bibliography, genealogy, table of literary precedents for JS&MN and The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Because if pressed, I'd say The Rose and the Ring is an ancestor too. Not that I remember anything of it, just that it gave me the same icky antsiness as Clarke's Fairyland.)
Yes, I know the literary tradition works the other way, and I'm almost sure that Kingsley contributed to the nastiness of Clarke's fairies as well. But as it is, having seen the notion writ large in Jonathan Strange, I can now deal with it written small in Lud-In-The-Mist.
(I need a-- whatever: bibliography, genealogy, table of literary precedents for JS&MN and The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Because if pressed, I'd say The Rose and the Ring is an ancestor too. Not that I remember anything of it, just that it gave me the same icky antsiness as Clarke's Fairyland.)
no subject
There's probably a reason why both the later works are set in post-18th century societies. The irrationality of fairydom stands in contrast to the assumed rational nature of society. (Practice of course is quite another matter.) Victorians who wrote fairies set out to make them sweet and cute, possibly because they sensed that fairies are actually dangerous monsters of the Id.