Fairies... the Fair Folk... the Seelie and Unseelie Courts... the Good Neighbors. The Little People, the ones who were here first, the ones who hide and play in our garden flowers. They sour the milk and bless the firstborn. You know them. Tinkerbell is a fairy, as is Puck, who puts a girdle 'round the earth in twenty minutes. When King Oberon and Queen Titania fight, the seasons themselves shudder in their tracks. Fairies. Do not thank them, and do not underestimate them.
What if you want to write about them?
Well...
I just finished Sarah J. Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses . She writes about a heroine named Feyre (not derived from "ferrous," iron, one of fairies' traditional weakness... a missed opportunity there) who is whisked away by a faerie lord after she kills one of his men. Tamlin abides in springtime splendor, is outrageously handsome except for his jeweled mask, and after one hundred pages of banter, he smiles a crooked smile and you know where this is going. Tamlin and Feyre fall in love.
And that's fine! I just find this particular take on fairies to be boring. You see this type in Holly Black's The Cruel Prince , not to mention Cecelia Dart-Thornton's The Battle of Evernight .
(Incidentally, I am still not over the moment I opened The Cruel Prince and saw that it was dedicated to Cassandra Clare. Cold horror washed over me. Maybe Black doesn't remember the crimes of early Pottermania, but the North remembers.)
The thing is, all three of these faerie lords from three different writers are not only each badly written, but they’re all badly written in the same way. Put simply, they’re too perfect. At least Black and Maas have the decency to give their faerie lord a personality, which is more than can be said for Dart-Thornton. These faerie princes are not recognizable as the fair folk: they’re basically human, except they're super-strong, can use magic, are surrounded by luxury, and don't age nor die.

I get it. They're an ideal dream guy. Patient-not-pushy, handsome-with-a-heart. But I don't think that excuses such pristine flatness. You could slap incisors on them and call them vegetarian vampires. You could hot-glue some wings on and call them angels.
C'mon, I want some fairies!
So Catherine, what's your idea of well-written fair folk?
I'm so glad you asked!

If you ask me to define "fairy," I would say "a fictional race distinct from humans, defined by a connection to nature and a facility with magic." "Elf" gets a very similar definition, though one distinction that comes to mind is this: elves are likely to have a much longer lifespan than humans, while fairies may have a much shorter lifespan. But for the purposes of this writeup, we can link fairies and elves with a linguistic cord.
Before there was Tolkien, there was Lord Dunsany and his haunting short story The Kith of the Elf Folk . Here are fairies as JM Barrie and Hans Christian Andersen would recognize them. Small sprites of the wild, by nature playful and fleeing. One little marsh spirit yearns for a soul, and ventures into the alien world of humans to try and find one. The story brims with melancholy, loneliness, and discovery. It may feature the elf folk, but it’s really about what it means to be human.
Now, what about J.R.R. Tolkien? Didn't he invent the modern elves, the wisest, fairest, and most beautiful of all beings? Well, yes. How about a connection to nature, and a longer lifespan? Yes, yes. The elves in The Fellowship of the Ring are certainly all those things. They're also tragic. The elves are fading from this world, and their history has so much bloodshed that the departure feels almost like a relief. Human and elfin love stories mingle sorrow with joy on a cosmic scale. When Arwen Undomiel marries Aragorn (spoiler alert!), she's not just leaving her dad's house. She's stepping from fate into free will, from Elvenhome to whatever awaits Men.
This, of course, is Tolkien writing about what is close to his heart. War, regret, free will, the power of love to connect fallen souls (be they elven or mortal) with the divine. Moving forward in time to 1995, Matthew Bourne created a new rendition of Swan Lake that deals with what’s closest to his heart. His Swan Lake is a story of secrecy and passion, gay love, and dance.
Bourne’s Swan Lake works as a psychological metaphor—the story of a psychic break—but it also works as an eerie romance, the love affair between a human Prince and a swan-fae. Will Bozier (the Swan) came off as very different from Andrew Monaghan (the Prince)—Bozier’s Swan was a creature of passion and wildness—but Monaghan’s yearning brought the two dancers to equilibrium. Theirs was a story of opposites, of love bridging what seems an impossible gap. I count myself very lucky to have seen them at the Ahmanson, before the theaters went dark.
Bringing this to the 2010’s, I think Margaret Rogerson's An Enchantment of Ravens has one of the best romances between fairy and human I’ve ever read. One part is that Rogerson writes so well; another part is because the fairy comes off as inhuman. Rook is compelled to return a bow, he brings autumn wherever he goes, and any sort of art is entirely beyond him. I like that. It means that Rook—possibly the only fairy in the world possessing a proper heart— is more interesting to read about. Furthermore, it means that Rook and Isobel's love impresses me more, because fairies and humans feel inherently less compatible.
Another excellent and recent book that tackles this dynamic is Desdemona and the Deep , by C.S.E. Cooney. Cooney plays deftly with fantastical elements and human ones: one human-fairy-and-fairy love affair is written in terms of enchantment, soulmates, even destiny. Another romance is framed in terms of connection and lust—much more earthy, still compelling.
And of course, I keep citing romances between fairies and humans, but that’s just because I love a good love story. Fairies don’t have to be romantic interests. They don’t have to be human in the least. Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies conjures Good Neighbors (a desperate euphemism) who are sociopathic killers with the attention span of a gnat. The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley features dangerous fair folk who are mostly “Wet mouths and teeth.” In Beauty by Kerascoet and Hubert, fairies are recognizably intelligent (they can use language and have their own complex internal politics) but are either indifferent or malevolent towards humans.
Not everything needs to be exhaustively-researched mythpunk, where every last detail corresponds to some folkloric detail. But if you’re going to write fairies, make them distinct from humans. Make them recognizable as fairies. Embrace the challenges and limitations that fair folk offer, and then see if you can find a heart under the gossamer. Every book’s answer will be different. Fairies, like mermaids, ogres, and dragons, are a useful tool in the fantasy writers’ arsenal. Those fictional beings are twisted mirrors that remind us of what it really is to be human.