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of it. What all those versions have in common is a deceptively simple tale of a midwife who accidentally discovers that the ancient faerie folk are not just the stuff of legend. In the guise of poor fringe dwellers, they continue to exist within her rural community. The midwife soon pays dearly for her discovery when the Faerie retaliate by cruelly blinding her in one eye – the eye which peered in upon them and saw them for who they really are. This savage act usually brings the original story to an abrupt end, and readers are left to make of it what they will.
    So what are we to make of it? That was the first question I posed to myself when I set out to retell the story. At the most obvious level, it seemed to me that the taking of the eye is a warning of what the midwife can expect if she reveals the Faeries’ existence. But it is surely more than just that. It is also an enactment of the ancient lore, ‘an eye for an eye’. By looking past the human disguise and peering into the magical world of the Faerie, the midwife has awakened her ‘inner eye’; and for that gift, she must give up a portion of her earthly vision. In one sense she still has two eyes: one capable of ‘seeing’ into the wonderful and terrible faerie realm; the other restricted to the workaday ‘surface’ life we all lead.
    All of which raised a further issue: in the end, is she cursed or blessed? This struck me as a vital question, which many writers before me have struggled to answer. The poet, Keats, for instance, would probably have considered her cursed. In his well-known poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, his ‘knight-at-arms’, having once crossed into the land of Faerie, considers ordinary existence drab and colourless. All he can now perceive with his outer eye is a pointless wintry landscape in which ‘the sedge has withered from the lake,/And no birds sing’.
    Frankly, and with due respect to Keats, I find this puzzling. Peering into the enchanted heart of nature, into the vibrant world of the ‘other’, would surely add lustre to the ordinary, not render it drab, and it is this belief that I’ve tried to build into my retelling. Despite her suffering, Lucy, my young midwife, is blessed by her new-found vision. Deliberately, I’ve avoided trying to describe precisely how she now sees things – the ineffable, after all, can’t by its very nature be described. Rather, and in keeping with the unresolved spirit of the original, I’ve left her transformed world for the reader to imagine.
    In part, I suppose, I’m already explaining why, out of a feast of old stories, I chose this one. Yet it did have other attractions. For one thing, it is not so much a fairytale as a tale about the Faerie – and it is the Faerie, that elusive image of the ‘other’, which I find most compelling. Also, with its cruelly abrupt ending, it strips away that pretty nineteenth-century version of fairies which has so impoverished our reading of old stories. What the midwife sees, when she peeks through the crack in the door, is something both terrible and beautiful. It is akin to the Old Testament prophet Isaiah’s experience in the temple, when confronted by the awesome and terrible image of the seraphim. After such an experience, the world can never look the same again.
    For this reason I began my retelling with Lucy’s naïve, childhood notion of the fairies found in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and then deepened that experience into a moment of tragedy. This is partly intended as a preparation for what is to come; partly as a childlike version of Gretel’s earlier encounter; and partly, too, as an ironic means of undercutting later events. For if I’m to be honest, ‘Birthing’ is more a sequel to Gretel’s story than a simple retelling of it – a sequel that contains the original,