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Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon (1664-1734), a relative of the better-known Charles Perrault, was among the most important creators of the fairy tales genre. This ground-breaking collection gathers four stories originally published in 1696, a year before Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose, the classic The Dark Tower and the Luminous Days published in 1705, as well as an essay written in the form of a letter, in which Mlle L’Héritier casts more light on the detail of her thinking, the process by which the tales came to be written and the various things that she was attempting to achieve.
These stories may well be the source material that inspired Cinderella and the Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin, amongst others, and are not an adaptation of folklore, but an attempt to recycle literary inventions attributed to the medieval troubadours.
CONTENTS
From Oeuvres meslées (1696):
Marmoisan; or, Innocent Deceit
The Enchantments of Eloquence; or, The Effects of Mildness
The Clever Princess; or, The Adventures of Finette
Grateful Parnassus; or, The Triumph of Madame Des Houlières
From La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux (1705):
The Dark Tower
Ricdin-Ricdon
The Robe of Sincerity
Appendix: Letter to Madame de G***
Introduction and Notes by Brian Stableford
Cover by Mike Hoffman
Published by Black Coat Press in April 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61227-732-5
