We also get a sense of the man’s capable nature, much in the way Edgar Allan Poe would make use of an intelligent but flawed narrator to draw the reader in. We get a sense of the period through his turn of phrase and choice of words. Littlewood creates a voice for Fairclough through the letters which is both consistent and nostalgic. This is deftly handled and never strays into the kind of awful one-sided telephone conversation where the narrator/speaker repeats what is being said to them. Littlewood chooses to include only Fairclough’s writings and not Gardner’s responses, but there is enough reconstitution in the letters to indicated what Gardner might be saying. This premise grants the book a series of layers and anchors it to existing texts and mythology, but it isn’t quite executed as well as it might be, with no mention of the discovery included in the story, only a reference to it on the back cover. Fairclough’s letters are supposedly only revealed now, in 2017, having been ‘recently discovered’. In his letters, he explains the circumstances around a series of encounters with faeries involving his daughter Charlotte, and granddaughter, Harriet. Littlewood’s premise is that in 1921, her character (Fairclough) has become aware of this research and writes to Gardner and Conan-Doyle to have his experiences included in the publication. Conan-Doyle had learned of the existence of the photographs in 1920 and together with Gardner, sought to obtain proof that they were genuine. Fairclough writes a series of letters to a Mr Gardner, who is Edward Gardner, a member of the Theosophical Society of the 1920s and friend of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s who made use of the Wright and Griffiths photographs in his 1922 work, The Coming of the Faeries.

Littlewood’s work is a standalone story in Newcon Press’ second novella series, a collection of four fantasy books by four very different writers. The Wind by Jay Caselberg, Cottingley by Alison Littlewood, Body in the Woods by Sarah Lotz and Case of the Bedeviled Poet A Sherlock Holmes Enigma, by Simon Clark.Ĭottingley by Alison Littlewood picks up a tangential thread from the famous fairy mystery surrounding photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths that became known as the Cottingley Faeries. My second review of the Newcon Press Novella series released in Autumn 2017.