I’d seen The Coming of the Fairies by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Bison Books reprint 2006). In a former life I was a reporter, so I knew I wanted eyewitness accounts. How did you approach the research process for your story? What research sources did you turn to? What roadblocks did you run into? How did you overcome them? What was your greatest coup, and how did it inform your manuscript? 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. A delight for everyone with a fondness for fairies, and for anyone who has ever started something that spun out of control. 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this enthralling true story as a fanciful narrative featuring the original Cottingley fairy photos and previously unpublished drawings and images from the family’s archives. The girls promised each other they would never, ever tell that the photos weren’t real.īut 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? 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. They were tiny men, dressed all in green. From the promotional copy:įrances was nine when she first saw the fairies.

Mary Losure is the first-time author of The Fairy Ring, or Elsie and Frances Fool the World (Candlewick, 2012)( excerpt).

The fairy ring by mary losure