“C’era una volta un gufo”: incanto e disincanto in “The Brown Owl” di Ford Madox Ford

Abstract

Although The Brown Owl was a successful fairy tale when first published in 1891, it has since been unjustly forgotten. The Brown Owl was Ford’s first work, written for his sister Juliet to reassure her after the saddest event of their life: their father’s death and the division of their family. The “fairy story” as Ford calls it, seems to follow the scheme of popular fairy tales but it was born out of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which Ford frequented in those years and carries most of the features of the late Victorian literary aestheticism. Art for art’s sake, irony, disenchantment, longing for evasion, are among them. Ford himself later belittled his fairy tales defining them as “twaddle”, but fairy tale motifs peep out throughout his prose and seem to play an important role in his view of the world.