Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death by suicide, animal cruelty, and illness and death.

Emily is the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel. The queen of the Faerie realm of Silva Lupi and the youngest professor to be hired at Cambridge in the novels’ universe, Emily is a 31-year-old dryadologist. Emily describes herself as plain-looking, though this is probably an unfair comparison to the unearthly beauty of the Faerie folk. Dark-haired, Emily prefers sensible, comfortable clothing in which she can conduct her field studies easily. Her clothes sometimes have ink stains on them. Emily is the author of an encyclopedia of faeries, which is highly regarded in academic circles. Because of her research, publications, as well her unusual position as a mortal Faerie queen, Emily is in demand at academic conferences, which greatly pleases her. Since the novel and the series are structured as the first-person journal entries of Emily, the reader gets great insight into her character, both through her descriptions of herself and through what such descriptions miss.

Thrust into the overwhelming world of Faerie, where beauty coexists with violence, Emily often perceives Faerie nobility trying to undermine her.