The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of short stories set in the same world as Susanna Clarke’s incredibly successful Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – historical fantasy in England during the Napoleonic wars, where magic is a forgotten but reviving art. The stories are low key encounters with wizards and fairies, which are a delight to read, bolstered by a few (admittedly minor) instances of size change.
Overall, the book has the same style as Jonathan Strange, presenting stories as vintage academic accounts, which adds a sense of atmosphere and authority. The fairies are tricky and unpleasant, not necessarily small but with magic that makes anything seem possible – including the existence of tiny people. There was an element of this in Jonathan Strange, though never quite realised, where a character blurts out that in a magical trance she saw a tiny man riding a ferret. This collection opens us up to more such curious details, with two particular stories that touch on size-warping ideas.
Transformation in The Ladies Of Grace Adieu
The title tale has a lovely conclusion: it concerns a trio of young women dabbling in magic as two unpleasant men settle into one of their estates (against the background of magician Mr Strange visiting this village). The women conspire like witches and one evening when they are with the two men, two of the women disappear and owls appear in their place. The remaining woman warns that the owl’s cry is to petrify its prey, with the following results:
. . . no one answered her, for there was no one in the corridor but herself and the owls (each with something in its beak). “How hungry you are, dearest,” said Miss Tobias approvingly. “One, two, three swallows and the dish goes down.”
Later, tiny bones are discovered on the property, which Strange suggests are from mice, but his wife points out they were in the ladies’ cloths, and says, “I hope you are not suggesting that these ladies have been eating mice?”
It’s suggestive rather than descriptive, tenuous perhaps, but I found it a nice allusion to the women shrinking and eating the men (if in owl form!).
Venetia Attacks Tiny Fairies in Mrs Mabb
The more explicit encounter between a woman and tiny people occurs in “Mrs Mabb”, a story about Venetia, a woman duelling with a fairy, Mrs Mabb, who wishes to ensnare her beloved, Captain Fox. Venetia discovers Mrs Mabb lives amongst tall flowers which she imagines to be like a castle; she reaches out to break up the home with her hands and is attacked by a crowd of winged creatures that she realises are tiny flying soldiers, with the following results: “she snatched them out of the sparkling air and crushed them in her hands.” The fairies then start dancing around her and “she took great pleasure in knocking them to the ground and treading upon their pale green clothes.” She kills some and injures others, but they keep coming, until she is brought around by being told they are only butterflies. Venetia later reunites with Captain Fox, who was inside Mabb’s house and reports that after the battle bodies were indeed taken in, confirming Venetia actually crushed the tiny people.
These are tiny snippets of not much, but they have that great alluding quality that triggers the imagination to more; while it may not do much to satisfy die-hard size aficionados, I love to find these kinds of small details in a good book, especially one that takes efforts to make such things blend with reality (and even more so when the results are so merciless!).
