Elisabeth’s Faeries

At the end of July, faeries will invade the gardens at Oakhurst, bringing their magic with them to delight our visitors. The event Faeries, Sprites, & Lights was conceived more than twenty years ago as a tribute to Elisabeth “Betty” Ball’s childhood belief in faeries. Betty, the only child of George A. and Frances Woodworth Ball, grew up playing in the woods and gardens surrounding her Oakhurst home. Her active imagination allowed her to see the faeries dancing under the trees, skipping through the grasses, and sitting on the flowers.

Eventually, Betty left her enchanted woods for boarding school and, afterwards, Vassar College. She returned to her childhood home an accomplished poet. After Betty’s death, her cousin, Rosemary Ball Bracken, published a book of her poetry. In her foreword to the book, Hope Barnes, editor of Oakhurst Poems and Obiter Scripta of Elisabeth Ball, wrote “As Elisabeth . . . experienced beauty in all aspects of nature, she saw the magic of a poet’s world and wrote her feelings about it.” Faeries occasionally still made an appearance in Betty’s world as she wrote in The Sunset Fay:

On the edge of a rose-gray cloudlet
Against a golden sky
A little fay was standing
On tiptop, with head high.

Her filmy garment blew behind
As slowly she rose in flight.
She flew toward the fading sunset
And a star appeared in the night.

Betty was an educated, accomplished woman, but as her lifelong friend Emily Kimbrough noted in a tribute, “Elisabeth . . . kept open the gates between the ‘real’ and ‘the other.’” Maybe the little faeries who attend Faeries, Sprites, & Lights will catch a glimpse of Betty in the woods of Oakhurst.

Betty at the time of her Vassar graduation, 1922.