Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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I've been working my way slowly through Fen and not wanting it to end - Daisy marries realism to the uncanny so well that the strangest turnings ring as truth.

Each Hag story has a woman either at its heart or close to it; women's friendships and their enmities, their power to give birth and to deal death, to harm and to heal thread their way through the narratives. This project has a meta-fictional element to it, and two of the stories take this to a heightened level. She has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the New Angle Award for East Anglian writing. After that the baby, Muir starts to spend six months with his mother and six months with his father until one day, he decides that he wants to spend all his time with his mother.

So from Orkney, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, the Midlands, Yorkshire, and the Fens and more, imaginative, eerie, disturbing and unsettling stories are told, of the supernatural, that which cannot be explained, of mermaids, pixies, curses, demons, boggarts, fairies, and the green children. Her latest book ‘Born Between Crosses’ is a sequence of Prose-Poetry celebrating the working lives of Working Class Women, published with Hypatia Publications 2021 and her latest short-story features in HAG: Forgotten Folk Tales published by Virago Press. Acc to Carolyne Larrington in the introduction, The British and Irish folktale traditions slipped away between the 18th and 19th centuries while other fairytales like the Grimms and Andersens’ with strict morals became popular.

I'm exhausted by stories about pregnancy and childbirth being the only Universal Womanly Experience and that's a core feature of the majority of these stories (and you'll never guess what core underlying trait isn't in the two I sort of liked). I didn't like Chlo as a person, but it was really interesting seeing the relationship between the sisters without them actually being close. Retelling english folklore, some I knew, others I didnt, but bringing them kicking and screaming into the modern world.

An entertaining collection of short stories, modern retellings of folk tales from all parts of the British Isles. Some of the authors in this collection were familiar to me and I loved revisiting their imaginations. We can’t know what Kathleen looked like, says the author, and so ‘we are, generally, at liberty to envisage her as we fancy’.

Eira thinks that she knows the young woman and she helps deliver the baby only to find out that things aren't as they seem. Highly recommended, particularly for those readers interested in becoming acquainted with a flavour of the range of British folk tales and their retelling. Some stories stayed within the old-fashioned setting of the originals, but I preferred the ones that updated the scenery and put a modern, forward-thinking twist on the plot.In Hag a range of brilliant female authors from Britain and Ireland were assigned a folktale and given free rein on how to adapt it. Overall, Hag is a successful endeavour, in that it brushes the dust off some excellent British and Irish folklore. To read Daisy Johnson is to have that rare feeling of meeting an author you’ll read for the rest of your life.

Loved learning about some lesser known folktales, and combining that with samples of writing from authors new to me. Unfortunately this meta-trick falls limp after Johnson’s story, which, by this point, has already explored the narrative loopholes of folktales only a few stories earlier. I love creepy stories, I love stories in which it is left up to the reader to decide whether what is happening is supernatural or the mind responding to trauma, and I love wlw, so it's no wonder I loved this one.I have always enjoyed folktales but these feminist, contemporary retellings of forgotten British folktales were delectable!