‘Strangely at Home in Fairyland’: The Faun in Laurence Housman’s Garden

Abstract

In his 1983 study of the illustrator and writer Laurence Housman (1865-1959), Rodney Engen affirms the centrality of fairy tales to his artistic and personal life on its first page. Housman, Engen writes, was ‘a true romantic with a childish love of fantasy’, one who ‘learned to turn his sensitive, private nature into an escapist world filled with fairies… [and later] recalled how essential those fantasies were to his struggles’.^[i] To support this characterization, Engen quotes from Housman’s musings on the purpose of fairy tales and from critical reactions to his works. ‘The true end and object of a fairy tale is the expression of the joy of living’, Housman argues,

so for the true and unpolluted air of fairyland we have to go back to the old and artless tales of a day purer and simpler than our own; purer because so wholly unconcerned with any questions of morals, simpler because so wholly unconscious of its simplicity.^[ii]

Despite its apparent remoteness, however, at least one critic – the writer and editor Charles Kains Jackson – found Housman’s work suggestive of the fact that he was ‘strangely at home in fairyland’.^[iii]   

[i] Rodney Engen, Laurence Housman (Catalpa Press, 1983), p. 11. Currently, this is the only biography of Housman (1865-1959).

[ii] Engen, Laurence Housman, p. 60.

[iii] Charles Kains Jackson, quoted in Engen, Laurence Housman, p. 60.