the classic fairy tales norton critical editions

Mme de Sévigné, writing to her daughter, revealingly reported a metaphor borrowed from the kitchen to describe the new enthusiasm: ‘cela s’appelle les mitonner. The women who inaugurated the fashion for the written fairy tale, in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, consistently claimed they had heard the stories they were retelling from nurses and servants. Boccaccio, and his admirer and emulator (to some degree) Chaucer, voiced the stories of women, and some contain folk material which makes a strong showing in later fairy stories the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (the ‘Babbler’) reported the stories told by a circle of ladies in his entertaining and sometimes scabrous fantasies, filled with fairytale motifs and improbabilities, called Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights), published in 1550 the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile, in Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), also known as Il Pentamerone (The Pentameron), published posthumously in 1634–6, featured a group of wizened and misshapen old crones as his sources. Marguerite de Navarre, in the Heptaméron, gives the stories to ten speakers, five of whom are women: they too, like the narrator of The Arabian Nights, put their own case, veiled in entertaining and occasionally licentious fantasy.

So although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women’s stories from intimate or domestic milieux their tale-spinners often figure as so many Scheherazades, using narrative to bring about a resolution of satisfaction and justice.

The classic fairy tales norton critical editions