The Fairy Necklaces

by Cicely Mary Barker

With the assistance of the fairies, who offer an unexpected present, Jenny comes up with a way to help her poor mother, in a charming fairy tale, first published in 1946.

Genres: Picture Books, Childrens, Fairy Tales, Fairies

Hardcover

First published August 1, 1992

About the author

Cicely Mary Barker was the illustrator who created the famous Flower Fairies; those ethereal smiling children with butterfly wings. As a child she was influenced by the works of the illustrator Kate Greenaway, whom she assiduously copied in her formative years. Her principal influence, however, was the artwork of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Reviews

[Jaimie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cicely Mary Barker's most popular work is undoubtedly her collections of seasonal and themes flower fairies, but this single attempt at a more traditional fairytale is also charming. Our story starts out expectedly enough with a young girl from a poor family who wants to help her family. We don't get much of the family's backstory (where is the father in this scenario and why are they living with their great uncle), but Barker is clearly working in the simplified mode of hte folktale where actual identities mean little as long as we get an informative story and things work out nicely at the end. In this story the climax occurs when our protagonist wishes for enough necklaces to wear a new one every day for a year, not knowing that two fairies are listening outside her window. In most cases this kind of greed on the part of humans resulting in unexpected gifts from the fairies ends badly as the humans learn their lessons the hard way, but our young protagonist has already proven to have a relatively selfless nature and the family's plan to give some of the necklaces away as gifts assures readers that there is a correct way to profit without greed. Barker's accompanying illustrations may not be as intrinsically interesting as her flower fairiies, but she does include a few and the human characters are executed equally well.

[Solveig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny decides to sell groundsel to help her mother and befriends a jeweler with canaries. Then the fairies gift her a chest of necklaces.

[Alana (semi ia) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never stop loving these books and filling my shelves with them. Cicely Mary Barker, the woman - the fairy - you are!

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cicely Mary Barker was best known for her flower fairy illustrations, published in small volumes with complimentary poems. In tracking those down, I came across this other book by Barker from 1946 and ordered it out of curiosity.

It's the same size as her fairy books, and similarly it contains lovely illustrations. But rather than poetry, it's a novella. It was later republished as The Fairy Necklaces, a title that fits the story and is probably more marketable.

The plot follows an ordinary but good-hearted girl named Jenny who lives in the country with her widowed mother, older brother, and curmudgeonly great uncle. Her mother works as a char woman in the nearby great house to support the family. Jenny comes up with the idea to sell the groundsel that she weeded out of the vegetable patch in town, as it makes good food for canaries. She'll use the money to give to her mother so she doesn't have to work so hard. In town, a kind old jeweler buys the groundsel and says he needs a regular supply. The two soon strike up a friendship.

One day, the fairies overhear Jenny wishing she had more than just her one necklace of beads that she made herself, and decide to grant her wish. She wakes to find a chest full of beautiful necklaces and a note from the fairies. (Hence the alternate title.) I don't want to give the whole plot away, but it's a really charming story.

There are a generous 12 color plates as well and several black and white illustrations--the book is only 48 text pages. As with many old children's books, the illustrations aren't always where they're relevant to the story, usually appearing before that point in the story, but the black and whites are sometimes after, at the end of the chapter where there's white space. I suspect that the black and white illustrations may have been drawn after the book was typeset to fill every bit of each page. The funniest illustration is the first color plate, opposite the title page, showing a boy looking over a fence at a girl working in a garden with the caption, "Jenny, I want you!" (What sort of racy book is this? I wondered as I started reading. Turns out, it's just her brother, who wants to show her something he made.)

It's a shame Barker didn't write more short novels. As far as I can tell there were just two others, The Lord of the Rushie River and Simon and the Swan (which I also ordered in an omnibus edition, and am looking forward to reading.) There is one other book, The Sand, the Sea and the Sun published in 1970, but I can't find anything beyond the title on-line, so not sure if it's a novella or a book of poetry.