“Fairy wives” behaved less like inexplicable creatures of the spirit world and more like women who’d figured out how to have long-term heterosexual relationships without ceding their dignity or autonomy. So if Michael Cleary had a wife who was more beautiful than ordinary women, who wielded more control than ordinary women, who acted “too fine” for him or anyone, who had a habit of disappearing—well, he knew what to call her. If tradition had taught him anything, it was that a woman who insisted too much on being treated like a person was probably not a person at all.