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Oh What a Circus!

August 29, 2025

What is it about a circus that heightens the emotions, offering the perfect backdrop to stories of love, loss and lives in the full glare of the spotlight?

Towering tents. Strings of lights and reeking greasepaint. Illusionists, acrobats, fortune tellers and magicians. What setting can outdo a circus for romance and drama? The thrills of the big top spill across art gallery walls in the works of Toulouse-Lautrec and Marc Chagall, and light up cinema screens in movies such as The Greatest Showman and Like Water for Elephants. They offer a universally beloved escape from reality. But no fictional circus has captured contemporary imaginations quite like Erin Morgenstern’s Cirque des Rêves.

The Night Circus takes place in an alternate Victorian era, when successive protégés of two powerful magicians must vie for dominance on behalf of their masters. Their battleground? A wandering circus open only from sunset to sunrise, prone to disappear and reappear without warning. The contest can end only when one competitor dies. But when Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair take up the fight – their rival identities unknown to each other – they fall slowly yet inexorably in love.

‘The Night Circus had a long, strange evolution,’ recalls author Erin Morgenstern. ‘I had been working on another project and had grown tremendously bored with it. Out of that boredom and a fair bit of desperation I sent the characters to a circus, which was immediately much more interesting. It appeared in my head almost fully formed: a collection of striped tents set within a fence, with a bonfire at the centre.’

As Erin explains, the black and white aesthetics of the Cirque des Rêves played a large part in shaping its narrative. ‘There was a long, long process of digging through the pieces looking for a story, and it settled into a competition partly because I already had that chessboard colour scheme,’ she says. ‘Then I realised that if I placed Marco and Celia in a competitive situation, it was going to evolve into a romance.’

Folio Fiction Editor Sophia Schoepfer says she first encountered The Night Circus more than a decade ago. ‘I remember the total immersiveness of that enchanted circus,’ she says. ‘I had never been so utterly transported by a book. Now, as an editor, I admire its enduring magic.’ Sophia worked with artist and illustrator Cristina Bencina to create an edition that looks and feels as magical as the world on its pages.

Bencina’s dark and whimsical artwork is sprinkled throughout, while the crimson slipcase is, quite literally, an invitation to the circus, decorated with a ticket for the Cirque des Rêves. ‘The iconic circus tent adorns the gilded binding,’ Sophia explains, ‘and there is even magic in the finer details. The scarlet ribbon is a homage to the uniform of the Rêveurs, which must always include a single red accent – a scarf, for example. And as a final flourish, the top edge of the book is sprayed with gold.’

Erin says she is thrilled with the result. ‘During the design process, I have been raving about all of the perfect choices, from the slipcase to the endpapers,’ she says. ‘I got to approve the choice of illustrator, and I am over the moon about Cristina and her exquisite illustrations. I find the way she combines delicate line work with bold colour choices utterly transfixing, and her images just seem to glow. It’s impossible to pick a favourite but I have been besotted with her fortune teller since the first moment I saw it.’

“Amid its dazzling illusions and blossoming love, the pennanted tents of the Cirque des Rêves cast long shadows that harbour murder and violence.”

Before her authorial debut cast its spell over readers, Erin had majored in Theatre and Studio Art at prestigious American liberal arts Smith College. Did that training, too, shape The Night Circus? ‘I had burnt out on theatre just after I graduated,’ Erin says. ‘But I’d done a little bit of everything from directing and acting to lighting design, and those skills are useful for writing fiction.

‘I’m very particular about how scenes are lit, because lighting can change the tone of a space so drastically. When writing, I have a theatrical production in my mind, and I have to translate it into words so the reader can picture it in theirs, and it helps to know how to fill all of those roles, from costuming to acting.’

Still a keen theatregoer, Erin found inspiration in the immersive theatre scene emerging at the time she worked on The Night Circus. ‘While I was in the middle of those early circus drafts, I went to see Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in Brookline, Massachusetts and it broke my brain wide open,’ she recalls.

‘It felt like someone had conjured the contents of my head and made them a reality. I went back several times and wrote little bits of it into the circus afterward – most notably the entrance tunnel, because Sleep No More made me realise the necessity of a transition from the real world to the dream space. I’m always chasing that immersive quality when I write.’

Alongside the iconic aesthetics and immersive atmosphere, it is the star-crossed love story between Celia and Marco that has won The Night Circus its devoted following. While appetite for ‘romantasy’ surges among both longtime readers of fantasy and bookish users of TikTok, The Night Circus offers a love story that is achingly romantic, and yet grounded in psychological complexity. ‘The book follows Marco and Celia from childhood into their 30s,’ Erin explains, ‘so there’s a lot going on as they grow and change. They’re meant to be rivals but they’re such kindred spirits that once they begin creating feats within the circus there’s both a mutual admiration and a fascination. They’re artists finding their own voices; they fall in love through their art and then, of course, the complications follow.’

“There’s a dreamlike quality to a circus that ranges through many types of scenes, from fantastical to frightening. There are near-endless possibilities there.”

Those complications shade toward darkness. Amid its dazzling illusions and blossoming love, the pennanted tents of the Cirque des Rêves cast long shadows that harbour murder and violence. It is in the novel’s breathless, endlessly twisting conclusion that the circus setting comes fully into its own. ‘There’s a dreamlike quality to a circus that can range through many types of scenes, from fantastical to frightening,’ says Erin. ‘There are sounds and scents and a visceral quality to the experience that goes beyond sitting in seats in a theatre. Circus is so malleable as a medium, in reality and fiction and art. There are near-endless possibilities there.’

Erin has written an exclusive new introduction for this Folio edition. ‘Whether this is your first visit to Le Cirque des Rêves or your third or thirteenth, I bid you welcome,’ it concludes. ‘I hope you enjoy the time you spend within these tents and these pages. The sun is setting. The circus is open.’ Those who stream through its gates will find magic awaits. ‘Erin has created a world that is at once authentic and fantastical,’ says Sophia. ‘It invites total escapism, and it enchants so generously.’