Who Gets to Be Cozy? Thoughts on Cozy Fantasy

I recently read Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, and I have thoughts.

I want to preface them by saying that I enjoyed the voice and the story. Quite a few reviews claim the book is overwritten, but I think the voice absolutely fits the protagonist, and that this kind of critique falls under “I wish you’d written the book I wanted to read.” This is a reminder that developmental editing or stylistic flaws with a book should always be interpreted within the context of the story.

Here’s part of the blurb so you get the gist:

Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, and the Fair Folk.

But while I enjoyed the story, I felt a creeping discomfort as I read, because the cozy and “familiar” surrounding is a nineteenth-century UK scholarly environment, about a researcher who goes to study other “peoples” (faeries in this case), and she doesn’t always treat those other “peoples” very well, especially at the end of the book.

This got me thinking, as I’ve been hired as a sensitivity reader for cozy fantasy novels before, and this formed some of my feedback there as well. The cozy is often a world familiar to the English middle and upper classes: a world of boarding schools, Oxbridge, of pies, apple crumble, and cups of tea, along with some kind of adventure into the exotic or into danger.

My sense is that some of the key tropes and touchstones of the cozy fantasy genre can, like cottagecore, have a kind of anesthetizing effect on the reader while idealizing the bucolic, with characters often departing on some kind of voyage or quest from a safe setting (the archetypal shires), which they return to.

I think we should ask: Who is that setting safe for? Who gets to be cozy?

After all, some of the settings that are romanticized (such as boarding schools and high-pressure scholarly environments) in these novels are unpleasant or even abusive, even for those they are intended for.

Lots of bigger questions, including those of land ownership, appropriation, and history are passed over to create, in some cases, a kind of timeless pastoral setting.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to all cozy fantasy novels: I'm here for low-stakes conflict, quirky characters, and that fuzzy autumnal feel.

After all, we can enjoy weird fiction despite H. P. Lovecraft's racism, especially as the genre has learned from its history and become much more inclusive in recent years. I wonder if cozy fantasy will have a similar reckoning at some point.

But it is a pattern I’ve noticed across a few books. Any thoughts? Let me know!