Search Results

“... Clever Gretchen’ and Other Forgotten Tales sets out to right a balance heavily weighted during the age of the great Victorian collectors of fairy-tales, ballads and lore. In that age, of the vapours and Mrs Beeton’s steam puddings, it was considered unlikely that a young woman, hearing of an attractive young man in some distant part of the world, would go off immediately in search of him – or that a judge’s wife would turn from the suet to the lawsuit and make a better job of it than her husband ...”

“... meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages to spot that the wife is a wolf, her husband a mere man. But the meaning is always there, urging us to spot ...”