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This two-volume collection assembles all the known tales of the fays published by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy (1651-1705).
From the early 1690s onwards, Madame d’Aulnoy was an active member of a literary salon where she and the Comtesse de Murat became the most prolific contributors to the new genre of the contes de fees, which they helped invent, shape and develop. Like almost all of the other members of her coterie, she became a renegade female aristocrat writing tales for the select consumption of other renegade female aristocrats about a world the corrupt glamour of which they understood only too well, with a depth of sarcasm that the innocent could not be expected to comprehend.
One should regard Madame d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat as significant writers of Decadent fantasy, and one wonders what they might have done had they been allowed to continue with their work. Given that both had extraordinary imaginative range, it is hard to imagine that they would have run out of inspiration, had they not been violently stopped in their tracks. We have to be grateful that they contrived to publish as much as they did during their brief window of opportunity, leaving behind fugitive material that could be recovered once the worst of the repression had blown over.
Considered separately Madame d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de
Murat were great writers of imaginative fiction, but as a competitive
collective, they are unique in literary history, and it is as part of
that collective endeavor that Madame d’Aulnoy is fully entitled
to her classic status today.
CONTENTS:
Introduction.
Princess Carpillon
The Benevolent Frog
The Woodland Hind
The New Bourgeois Gentleman:
— The White Cat
— Belle-Belle; or, The Chevalier Fortuné
— The Pigeon and the Dove
— Princess Belle-Etoile and Prince Cheri
— Prince Marcassin
— The Dolphin
Cover by Mike Hoffman
Published by Black Coat Press in February 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61227-837-7
