There is a distinct lack of fairies in Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. There are a fair amount of talking beasts, supernatural beings and things that do not conform to the laws of physics, but no actual fairies. Ditto beautiful princesses in peril. The term ‘fairy tale’ is used loosely here to describe “the great mass of infinitely various narrative that was, once upon a time and still is, sometimes, passed on and disseminated through the world by word of mouth”. These are tales from the oral tradition that serve to preserve and perpetuate the history and culture of communities with little or no written language. Angela Carter was a firm believer that, just because a country or culture lacked written volumes, there was no reason to suppose that country or culture lacked a rich literary tradition.

Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales collects together two volumes of fairy tales that Angela Carter edited, which were originally published as The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). The fairy tales collected here are too numerous to list but some flavour of the contents can found from the thirteen categories into which the stories are grouped:

1. Brave, Bold and Wilful
2. Clever Women, Resourceful Girls and Desperate Stratagems
3. Sillies
4. Good Girls and Where it Gets Them
5. Witches
6. Unhappy Families
7. Moral Tales
8. Strong Minds and Low Cunning
9. Up to Something – Black Arts and Dirty Tricks
10. Beautiful People
11. Mothers and Daughters
12. Married Women
13. Useful Stories

The stories all have one thing in common – they all centre on a female protagonist. Whether the female in question is wise or wicked, brave or unfortunate, she takes centre stage in the tale. The fairy tales collected in this volume come from around the world – from Europe, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, the USA, the Arctic, Africa, the Middle East and Asia – and since the women involved are certainly not homogeneous,they serve to demonstrate, as Carter herself said, the extraordinary richness and diversity with which femininity is represented in unofficial culture.

Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales is proof that fairy tales are certainly not just for children. While an absolute feast for the imagination, the tales collected in this volume are not for the fainthearted as there is plenty of low cunning, wicked plotting and dark arts to be found within the pages of this book. Every good collection of short stories should leave you wanted to read another after you have completed one story and it really is next to impossible to read just one of the fairy tales collected here – the stories might be short but they are absolutely riveting and, despite the unifying theme of femininity, are so different that there is no sense of repartition. There is perhaps something of a hypnotic quality about these fairy tales; they instantly transport the read to another time and another fantastical place where almost anything, whether tragic or amazing, sombre or hilarious, can and will happen.

This particular edition of Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales is a delightful small-sized hardback complete with ribbon page marker and illustrated throughout with original woodcuts.

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