The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

About the book

This collection brings together Perrault tales including Little Red Riding-Hood, Blue Beard, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Puss in Boots, and Cinderilla. Their compact narratives move quickly from ordinary desires to impossible circumstances, but magical assistance rarely removes the importance of judgment, timing, or appearances. Some endings and explicit morals differ from versions familiar through later adaptations. Reading the tales together makes their variety clearer: courtly wit, danger, cruelty, absurdity, and practical advantage do not produce one uniform lesson. Thomas Bodkin's introduction belongs to this edition's framing of the stories. The text retains references to Harry Clarke's illustrations, without promising that the original illustrated pages are reproduced here. These are literary tellings with their own voices, not neutral summaries of universal folklore.

• Wishes and consequences
• Appearance and advantage
• Magic and danger

Why read it

For brisk tales whose familiar outlines often conceal surprising tones and conclusions.

English collection · introduction by Thomas Bodkin, 1922 edition