Abstract
Roughly 150 years before the Oxford English Dictionary acknowledged that “fairy” can signify “nonheterosexual,” Horace Walpole (1717–1797) wrote the rollicking story “A Fairy Tale,” in which the eponymous fairy is the bisexual and flamboyantly gender-ambivalent Baron John Hervey. The tale is important because it represents the satirical, adult British fairy tradition that grew up in answer to the more widely published French fairy-tale tradition and because it provides scholars with a fresh frame of reference for investigating queer “fairy” language in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century texts.
Recommended Citation
Weeks, Jacquilyn. "Horace Walpole’s 'Fairy Tale'." Marvels & Tales 28.1 (2014). Web. <https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol28/iss1/12>.
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