It was to these that I first turned when I realised how allergic I’d become to princesses, but if there’s one gender cliché to rival that of the princess, it’s the ‘feisty’ girl. There are, of course, plenty of anti-princess princess books out there for children, either re-tellings of the fairy tales or independent narratives that engage in lively debate with their tropes. You can do a great deal to explain away a princess’s lack of agency and myopic focus on marriage, but the tales’ widespread moral objection to anything other than idealised physical perfection seems to be priming a child – and let’s face it, girls especially – for an adolescence spent photoshopping their own selfies and all the associated struggles with low self-esteem. As the parent of a girl, my main concern is their preoccupation with external beauty and the link that these narratives forge between a comely face and a good heart. Were I the parent of a boy, I daresay I’d have cavilled at the tireless insistence on heroism and the phobia of weakness and mistrust of emotion.

All of a sudden, the number of UK parents who edit fairy stories as they read them aloud – more than one in four, according to a poll published in 2018 – made complete sense. Never, for instance, say that you’ll never become one of those parents, because before you know it, you too will find yourself yearning to quote Germaine Greer to the mother whose kid can’t keep up in the playground because her sparkly fairy wings are quite literally holding her back.įor me, the realisation came when, having splurged on a particularly enchanting edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s collected tales, I was unable to find a single one that I cared to read to my young daughter in its entirety. The tiny library bringing books to remote villagesīut then, with the wave of a wand (or at least the ping of a fertility-tracking app), came motherhood, and with it plenty of newly relevant lessons, including this: never say never. Isn’t the kind of outrage voiced by celebrities like Keira Knightley and Kristen Bell, both of whom have publicly vowed never to let their children watch Disney films, just another example of the overly literal, piously-PC dim-wittedness that seems bent on wringing any remaining joy out of childhood? Yes, the stories can be bloodthirsty, their morality doesn’t always jive with current mores, and their gender stereotyping is as unyielding as a glass slipper, but they’re fairy stories. Once upon a time, I’d have rolled my eyes at the parental panic about fairy tales that seems to flare up as regularly as outbreaks of nits.

The complete fairy tales and stories