of fairy tales, and in the eighteenth century were often intermixed with them, as in Mme
Leprince de Beaumont’s Magasin des Enfans (1756).
The magic of modern fantasy fiction is an offspring of the joint parentage of tales
about fairies and fairy tales; born in the second half of the nineteenth century, fantasy
fiction matured in the twentieth century.
Both tales about fairies and fairy tales demonstrate the phenomenon of readership
boundary cross-over. The content of tales about fairies that were originally composed by
and for adults often passed, in simplified form, into the domain of children’s reading.
Mme d’Aulnoy’s Yellow Dwarf provides an example of this process: published with its
tragic conclusion throughout the eighteenth century for adults and for children, it was
altered to end happily for nineteenth-century child readers (Warner 1994:253).
For centuries, discrete narratives, whether tales about fairies, fairy tales or secular
tales, had been embedded within overarching story-telling narratives, like that provided
by the pilgrimage in the Canterbury Tales. The French précieuses’ tales about fairies
maintained this narrative tradition, but Perrault’s Contes broke with it. His structural
innovation, the free-standing fairy tale, became the norm in children’s literature,
although the embedded fairy tale periodically returned, for example, in Sarah Fielding’s
eighteenth-century novel, The Governess, and in a nineteenth-century English
reformulation of Grimms’ Tales into a twelve-night cycle between Christmas and Twelfth
Night told by Gammer Gurton.
FranceCharles Perrault’s Contes du Temps Passé (1697) and Madame d’Aulnoy’s Contes des
Fées (4 vols., 1710–1715) sowed the seeds for early modern and modern fairy tales and
tales about fairies. At a very early point tales about fairies and certain kinds of fairy
tales were identified as the products of women’s imaginations; and indeed there seem to
be qualitative differences between the tales women tell and those that men recount
(Holbek 1987:161 ff.). Whether children were ever significant contributors to the fairy
tale tradition, as the Abbé de Villiers suggested in 1699 (Warner 1991:11) is doubtful.
For the French book buying public in the eighteenth century, fairy tales existed in
three forms. The first consisted of chapbooks of the bibliothèque bleue, which foraged
among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tales about fairies and fairy tales in search
of fodder for their hungry presses and for an even more ravenous humble public, and
delivered French tales about fairies and fairy tales to a semiliterate and illiterate public
in France (Tenèze 1979:283–287). It was a population that provided nurses who told
fairy tales to children put in their care and who were, in part, responsible for the myth
of fairy tale orality. The second form comprised fantasy tales about fairies. These tales,
with little or no moral or moralising component, had been composed for adult readers
and often offered distinctly dystopic views of the human condition. Hence, their
suitability for children was highly problematic. There existed a third form, however,
intensely moralised fairy tales that were intended for child readers. Enlightenment
pedagogy remained dissatisfied with magic in any form, and by the late 1770s and early
1780s Rousseau and Locke had ‘gradually alienated the child from the world of
Perrault’s fairies ...and Mme Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beast”, and indeed, Mme de la
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