Fairy Tales

Faber 90th Stories brings together some of our finest short stories, past, present and future.

A wily cat, a strange romance, detestable daughters: the great American poet Marianne Moore retells three stories originally written by Charles Perrault to amuse the niece of Louis XIV.

Modern readers may be surprised to find that the prince does not wake Sleeping Beauty with a kiss – the more he cares, the less willing he is to intrude – and that his mother is descended from ogres.

Characterised by vivid imagery, uncluttered prose, inventive alliteration and a sly sceptic’s wit, Moore’s versions do more than tell a tale: ‘Having seen a problem solved,’ she writes, each one leaves ‘a pattern of order in the mind.’

About the Author

Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1887. She attended Bryn Mawr College, and lived her adult life in New York City, in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She was the author of numerous books of poems, including most notably Observations (1924), Selected Poems (1935), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), and Collected Poems (1951).

Moore's lifelong practice of a radically innovative formal verse, committed to moral courage and spiritual clarity, won her most of the major poetry awards available to an American: the Bollingen Award (1952), the National Book Award (1952), the Pulitzer Prize (1952), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1953), the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America (1967), and the National Medal for Literature (1968). She died on 5 February 1972.