Helen Mirrlees‘ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, probably not unrelated to Neil Gaiman’s effusive praise for it. It was never truly lost, but was hailed as an “unappreciated classic” for decades, undergoing surges of popularity and “rediscovery” in the 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s.
It is a delightful book, if a minor one, detailing the relationship between a prosperous trading village and the realm of the fairies, with which it shares a border. There is a forbidden, yet ever-present, commerce between the fairy lands and the human realms, chiefly the traffic of fairy fruit, an addictive and vaguely mystical substance, and this illicit trade marks out the primary plot points of the book, which also include staples of fairy literature: the retrieval of a child lost to the fairies, a love affair gone wrong and another gone right, etc.
Mirrlees was, from a quick perusal of her Wikipedia page, quite a character, one of who knows how many strong and talented women of a certain era largely lost or, at least, under-appreciated. Lud-in-the-Mist deserves its revival, and is a very pleasant interlude. Recommended!
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The whole fable thing. There is a focus in fables, an ability to exclude any of the questions around the story in favor of the things directly related to the movements of the underlying plot itself. That allows Lud-in-theMist to shift its focus several times as you realize the true story here is about the interactions between the fairies and the humans, and that various characters that come and go are merely incidental to that.