Monday, October 20, 2014

Once Upon a Time review – Marina Warner's scholarly history of the fairytale

A lifetime of investigation into storytelling has gone into this gem of a book from the queen of fairytales


Red Riding Hood by John Everett Millais
Gone Girl: Red Riding Hood by John Everett Millais. Photograph: Alamy
Marina Warner is our doyenne of fairy stories, the British equivalent to America’s Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar, only, it must be said, with a better prose style than either. Her book, From the Beast to the Blonde, was a memorable bestseller, and here she follows it and a lifetime of investigation into story-telling with Once Upon a Time: A Short History of the Fairy Tale.

Once obscure, the field has become quite a crowded one, with Sara Maitland’s Gossip from the Forest and Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm published recently, but Warner’s book is a little gem. What makes her special is her way of phrasing insights into the nature of the genre and into particular stories; her scholarly knowledge is not just worn lightly but presented with a flourish. “Imagine the history of fairytale as a map, like the Carte du Tendre…drawn by Parisian romantics to chart the peaks and sloughs of the heart’s affections,” she begins, captivatingly In 10 succinct chapters, she gives us an overview of pretty much all that we need to know about past and current thinking, from Bruno Bettelheim’s influential Freudian insights to Philip Pullman’s stating that “there is no psychology in a fairytale”.
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