Madame d'Aulnoy
French salon fairy tales from the writer credited with naming the form.
Madame d'Aulnoy told her tales in the Paris salons of the 1690s, and she is credited with coining the term "fairy tale" itself. Her stories are longer and stranger than the versions most of us grew up on: courtly, ornate, full of transformed princes and patient queens.
That unfamiliarity is her advantage at night. With Grimm or Perrault, part of your mind runs ahead to the ending it already knows. With The Benevolent Frog or The Little Good Mouse, there is no ending to run to, so attention settles into the sentence in front of it. The Story of Pretty Goldilocks, with its three impossible tasks solved by kindness, sits in the same category: an old shape, new details. So does Princess Rosette, which opens on fairies predicting disaster and later puts its heroine out to sea in her own bed, asleep through the worst of it.
Elizabeth Grace reads all four on The Sleepy Bookshelf, Princess Rosette as part of Princess Fairytales. On Send Me To Sleep, Andrew Bond pairs two classic French tales in Puss in Boots & Felicia and the Pot of Pinks, the collection to pick when you want one familiar story and one surprise in the same sitting.
