Gothic Faerie: An Essay on ‘A Ride Through Faerie’ in Issue 22 of Gramarye
We are delighted to announce the publication of ‘A 19th-century influence of Gothic Faerie: The fairy tree, fairy lover, fairy art, and fairy revenge in Clay Franklin Johnson’s poem “A Ride Through Faerie”’, an essay that discusses some of the literary inspirations behind our first book’s titular poem. The essay was published in Issue 22 of Gramarye, which is the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. You can read the essay alongside many others (including one on the fairy Melusine) on the University of Chichester’s website here.
Although the essay examines important Keatsian influences within ‘A Ride Through Faerie’, particularly in Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and ‘Lamia’, including a section on John Anster Fitzgerald (‘Fairy Fitzgerald’) and how his nightmarish fairy paintings inspired the opium dream in Part III, the essay also examines the EcoGothic through the poem’s use of otherness in a moonlit woodland and the ecocidal ruin of a hawthorn tree. The folklore of the hawthorn, known as the fairy tree, and the ecocide that occurred in the Amazon rainforest fires of 2019 are both central to the poem.
It is important for us to note that Chichester, where Gramarye is published, has a special connection with John Keats. It was there in the ‘bitter chill’ of Chichester where Keats began one of his finest poems, The Eve of St Agnes. According to some, including Keats biographer and former resident of Chichester Robert Gittings (1911–1992), Keats was inspired by the medieval architecture during his stay at Chichester which would influence lines in his poem. Keats likely arrived in Chichester on the 20th of January 1819, St Agnes’s Day, and in all likelihood he began writing The Eve of St Agnes on this very day. A statue of Keats was unveiled in Chichester’s Eastgate Square on the 26th of August 2017 in honour of his inspired time there.
To read more about the idea of Gothic Faerie, including inspirations from the legend of Thomas the Rhymer, the anonymous Middle English lai Sir Orfeo, Keats’s Otho the Great and the paintings directly inspired by the femme fatale in Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, read ‘In faery lands forlorn’: Celtic and Keatsian Influences in ‘A Ride Through Faerie’.