For many years now, women writers of fairy tales in the nineteenth century have been neglected. With few exceptions, such as Nina Auerbach’s andU. C. Knoepflmacher’s Forbidden Journeys (1992), Shawn Jarvis’s and Jeanine Blackwell’s The Queen’s Mirror (2001), and Shawn Jarvis’s Im Reich der Wünsche (In the Realm of Wishes, 2012), along with important Victorian anthologies by Michael Hearn and myself, remarkable fairy tales created by women in the nineteenth century have rarely received the attention they deserve. All this has now changed with the publication of Women Writing Wonder – and what teamwork! The editors and contributors of this volume have covered a vast field of significant women writers, some of whom have not been studied or mentioned in print before.
Their anthology of tales is divided into three parts along with a bibliography and index: Part I, Nineteenth-Century French Women Write Fairy Tales; Part II, German Women’s Writers and the Legacy of the Fairy Tale; Part III, Fairy Tales and Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain. In the introduction the editors state that they have chosen socially critical tales that contest tropes such as “happily after ever” and marriage as necessary for all women; tales that depart from the male standard of collecting folk and fairy tales set by the Brothers Grimm; and tales featuring the role that women played in the development of children’s literature. Given that there are twenty-one tales with commentary in this book, it is difficult to assess each one of them and do them justice. Therefore, I shall single out particular tales which represent the theme of each part of the book and conclude with a brief comment on the collection as a whole.
In the introduction to Part I, the French tales, Anne Duggan and Adrion Dula remark that the writers of fairy tales had different purposes, ranging from moral and ethical to female independence. The authors included here are Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, Julie Delafaye-Bréhier, Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse, George Sand, and Louise Michel. I was particularly drawn to Choiseul-Meus’s “Rose and Black” (1818) because it treats both sexism and racism in an unusual rewriting of the Cinderella tale-type. Here it is a beautiful princess who falls in love with a woodcutter’s son, and it is through the power of a fairy and a queen that she is able to marry him. In addition to this tale, Louise Michel, a radical feminist, wrote a remarkable tale called “The Ogress, Béatrix de Mauléon” (1872), which depicts the cannibalistic traits of capitalism. This is an extraordinary story that precedes male depictions of cannibalistic capitalism by a good century.
Part II includes German tales by Sophie Tieck Bernhard von Knorring, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Frau Lehnhardt and Bettina von Arnim, Dortchen Wild Grimm, Karoline Stahl, Adele Schopenhauer, Gisela von Arnim, Elisabeth Ebeling, and Hedwig Dohm. Many of the women writers in this section were married to notable male writers, and there was no doubt that there was some kind of mutual influence in their stories. However, it is clear, as can be seen in Adele Schopenhauer’s “The Forest Fairy Tale” (1844) and Hedwig Dohm’s “Lotte the Grump” (1899), that the topic of gender rights and female oppression play a key role in the themes of their tales.
Part III, Fairy Tales and Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain, contains stories by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Mary de Morgan, and George Egerton. The dominant theme in most of the tales, whether written for children or for adults, is a questioning of happy-ever-after endings. While many of the British stories depict unhappy conditions, Mary de Morgan’s “The Seeds of Love” (1877) is a remarkable fairy tale because it questions the ideal of marriage as a fantasy. Indeed, de Morgan was known to speak her mind about gender differences; marital happiness for her was a delusion.
Women Writing Wonder is based on the extraordinary work of an exemplary collective of contemporary female scholars who have opened up new insights into the history and rise of the literary fairy tale, particularly in the nineteenth century. Perhaps one could add Cristina Mazzoni’s The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales (2021) to complement this book, for it includes important fairy tales by Grazia Deledda, Emma Perodi, and Virginia Tedeschi Treves. Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt that more research should be undertaken to unearth the voices of women in fairy tales of the past.
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[Review length: 742 words • Review posted on October 7, 2022]