Mopsa the Fairy

William Ansley · 06 Sep 2000, 23:24 · from urth-v0029.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Mopsa the Fairy
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 23:24:25
Message-ID: <urth-v0029-0209 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0029/0209.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>An anthology recently appeared edited by Martin H. Greenberg entitled
>"My Favorite Fantasy Story" (published by Daw) in which a selection of
>prominent fantasy authors were each asked to "pick the one fantasy story
>that spoke to them, touched them, made them reexamine the genre in a new
>light."  Wolfe was one of the authors included, and his choice was
>"Mopsa the Fairy," a nineteenth-century children's story--really a short
>novel--by Jean Ingelow.  Among the things that Wolfe says about the
>story in his brief introduction is that "Ingelow dared answer a question
>that no other such writer has even dared ask: If there really were a
>fairy princess, what would she be like?"
>
>
>--Adam
>

I find this a very odd thing for Gene Wolfe to say, considering it is=20
a certainty (based on the evidence of "The Eyeflash Miracles") that=20
Wolfe read Baum's Oz books. Ozma is nothing if she is not Baum's idea=20
of what a "real" fairy princess would be like. She may not be a=20
terribly *inspired* fairy princess, but she is definitely a fairy=20
princess.

I suppose it all depends on what Gene Wolfe means by 'really' in "if=20
there really were a fairy princess". Based on my (mostly failed)=20
attempts to understand his fiction, I must admit I have no idea how I=20
would go about trying to understand his reality.

--=20
William Ansley

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net