Book review of The Art of Fairy Tales by Joanna Ebenstein

In order to truly appreciate The Art of Fairy Tales, you must start with its author, Joanna Ebenstein, the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that explores the intersections of art, medicine, death and culture. That sensibility ensures that The Art of Fairy Tales goes much darker and deeper than typical cartoonish tropes. Instead, it’s full of complicated characters that have been embraced by some of the greatest artists of all time. Ebenstein brings a depth of knowledge about the history of fairy tales to the text, explaining their origins as stories shared by women to pass time spent together. “Far from being children’s fare,” she writes in the book’s introduction, “fairy tales were once a central form of adult entertainment, rich with bawdy humour, cynical irreverence, sexuality and violence.” The book’s first section is devoted to artists’ depictions of fairies themselves. “Our yearning for the fairy may arise from an increasing sense of alienation from nature,” Ebenstein writes, “a lost connection to the spiritual and the magical and a diminishing relationship with the realms of imagination.” The book is filled with full-page illustrations, but this section includes one of its few photographs: an image by 16-year-old Elsie Wright that depicts her 9-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths surrounded by fluttering fairies. After being widely accepted as genuine for a time—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself vouched for its legitimacy—the photo was famously revealed to be a hoax. Other sections include “Heroes and Villains,” “Mermaids” and “Lands of Enchantment,” but a standout is “Witches and Dangerous Women,” in which a 1902 image by Russian illustrator Ivan Bilibin shows the fearsome witch Baba Yaga atop her enchanted mortar and pestle as she appears to glare directly at the viewer. This brilliantly curated book belongs in any collection centered on women, esoteric art or the history of storytelling.