The Teller’s Tale: Lives of the Classic Fairy Tale Writers ed. by Sophie Raynard (review)

The Teller’s Tale offers biographies of European authors and editors of fairy tales in one convenient and meticulously researched collection. Sophie Raynard’s brief introduction explains that the anthology “rectifies false data, adds new information, and provides a reliable historical context for Europe’s fairy tales” (3). Further, when documentation is deficient, essayists fill in the gaps through inference by taking into account known facts related to the social, cultural, and historical record. The result is an intriguing mix of fact with the occasional bit of conjecture rounding out each author’s life story, in the most comprehensive collection of biographies to date of this set of writers.

Raynard has organized the essays both chronologically and thematically, describing how the circumstances of each author’s life, such as origin, class, education, occupations, and personal interests, affected the fairy tales he or she published. The six sections are titled “Emergence” (Straparola and Basile); “Elaboration” (Perrault and the Conteuses Précieuses); “Exoticism” (Galland); “Didacticism” (de Beaumont); “Traditionalization” (Naubert, the Grimms, and Bechstein); and “Sentimentalization” (Andersen). The sections addressing more than one author’s work begin with an introductory essay describing the historical period and defining the characteristics of the fairy tales that were penned; sections covering just one writer embed this material in the biographical sketch. Each essay contains explanatory endnotes, a list of secondary sources, and an all-inclusive list of the authors’ works, categorized neatly. Having come across much less detailed biographies of many of these writers, I was struck by the sheer profusion and variety of works published; coupled with the biographical essays, the lists of published works prove unequivocally that these were very serious authors with literary careers. In addition to the fairy tales, they were creators of poetry, various novel types, dramatic compositions, correspondence, memoirs, travel books, translations, literary criticism, devotional writings, and many other sorts of publications. In fact, while Raynard correctly refers to her subjects as “classic fairy-tale authors and editors” (1), clearly the emphasis here is on authorship over editorial contributions.

The essays are written by an impressive array of critics with significant prior contributions to the fields of folklore and fairy tale studies, lending weighty expertise to the volume. While an anthology with such a diverse group of writers could risk losing coherence due to competing voices and writing styles, that is not the case here, as the essays blend seamlessly. Surely Raynard’s editing, translation, and adaptation skills must be praised, for I had to remind myself that each piece was written by a different author. The introductory essays included with the longer sections also contribute to the book’s continuity and are an integral link between the eras, deftly explaining how the fairy tale evolved over time as it was affected by historical and cultural events.

As noted in the introduction, a few biographies have some serious gaps in documentation. The approach to this conundrum is nothing short of fascinating, as writers of those sections use inference to attempt to sleuth out the missing details. What I liked about these sections is that the reader has no trouble discerning fact from speculation. In fact, the authors state exactly what led them to their conclusions while admitting that in some cases, we can never know the full story. Ruth Bottigheimer is like a detective at a literary crime scene, leaving no stone unturned in her investigation of evidence that might shed light on missing pieces in a particular writer’s story. For example, she interprets Straparola’s wary facial expression in an official portrait published in Pleasant Nights (1551; 1553) as a reflection of allegations of plagiarism against him, while later she cites the lack of a new portrait in reprints of the collection as probable evidence that Straparola died in 1555 or 1556, also known plague years in Venice. In Nancy Canepa’s essay on Giambattista Basile, she utilizes autobiographical references in...