January Virtual Book Club

The Cottingley Secret is a 2017 fantasy novel written by British novelist Hazel Gaynor, in which she retells the story behind the Cottingley fairies from 1917. This novel intermingles the real events that occurred in 1917 with a fictional story set in 2017. The Cottingley Fairies were made famous through a series of photographs taken from 1917 to 1921 by two young girls of nine and sixteen years old—Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright—in Cottingley, England. The story became renowned worldwide mainly because of the intervention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who took particular interest on the fairy photographs and tale. The photographs, which depict the two girls in the company of fairies, were originally published in Doyle’s article written in 1920 for Strand Magazine, but can be found in other articles as well since the matter of their copyright has been largely disputed.