The Fairy Ring: Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World [Hardcover]

The enchanting true story of a girl who saw fairies, and another with a gift for art, who concocted a story to stay out of trouble and ended up fooling the world.

Frances was nine when she first saw the fairies. They were tiny men, dressed all in green. Nobody but Frances saw them, so her cousin Elsie painted paper fairies and took photographs of them “dancing” around Frances to make the grown-ups stop teasing. The girls promised each other they would never, ever tell that the photos weren’t real. But how were Frances and Elsie supposed to know that their photographs would fall into the hands of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? And who would have dreamed that the man who created the famous detective Sherlock Holmes believed ardently in fairies — and wanted very much to see one? Mary Losure presents this enthralling true story as a fanciful narrative featuring the original Cottingley fairy photos and previously unpublished drawings and images from the family’s archives. A delight for everyone with a fondness for fairies, and for anyone who has ever started something that spun out of control.
Back matter includes source notes, a bibliography, and an index.From the bottle-green cover showing Elsie dreamily regarding a fairy to the book's creamy pages and art-nouveau lettering, "The Fairy Ring" is as delightful to hold as it is captivating to read.
—The Wall Street Journal

The yearning for the supernatural and the magical to be real seems timeless. In the early years of the twentieth century it was fairies that intrigued, especially those in a handful of photographs made by two girls in England...Losure has written an engaging account of the affair, focusing sympathetically on the two young photographers, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright... Losure provides a straightforward narrative that gives young readers a sense of the girls’ different personalities; the girls’ daily life in WWI Yorkshire;lÃo