For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. — G.K. Chesterton
I was lucky to grow up in a house with a lot of books. The one I loved the most, by far, was The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, with his wife, writer and translator Leonora Blanche Alleyne.
Without knowing (or caring) anything about the Scottishness or VIctorianness of Lang or the book, or about the origins of the stories themselves, I started reading because I was hungry for more of the “classic” tales I knew from Disney movies, simplified picture books from the public library, and elementary school storytimes: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, Goldilocks and The Three Bears, and Hansel and Gretel.
All of these are included in the Blue Fairy Book, but with more details, and an old-fashioned and very British writing style that permanently entangled itself in my mind with the ideas of magic, wonder, and escape. And they weren’t just more detailed, they were also weirder. The stories had odd elements that didn’t quite fit, and endings that didn’t quite make sense. They were messy, and the morals, if there were any, were far from the reasonable ones I’d heard in Aesop’s Fables or the cleaned-up versions of the fairy tales the grown-ups told us.
Thrillingly, they were often about the weak triumphing over the strong, and about righting injustices.
A few years later, when I was fourteen or fifteen, and had read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and was utterly miserable at school, I picked up that old volume again and fell hard for the deeper cuts, especially The Master Maid, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, and Toads and Diamonds.
It wasn’t just that I was older and I had experienced more, and understood more, by then (although that was true too). And although I loved the creepy strangeness of some of the setups — like ghosts, and severed heads being the good guys — that was also only part of it.
It was that once again I needed justice, especially the exhilarating, sudden, and satisfying kind that was so different from so-called real-life. As a small child, I’d felt the joy of a topsy-turvy land where animals talked and fairies descended to dispense treasures and punishments. As a teenager, I had a more nuanced understanding of the world I was forced to live in, and no matter how bookish I was, I was giving up on the idea of finding a fairy godmother.
At that point, an alternate universe where the heroine of The Master Maid — maybe a girl my age — could write her own story, protecting herself from unwanted suitors with bizarre creativity, filled me with hope.
I was also a young girl with a few tricks up my sleeve. Maybe I was also going to be okay.
And many years later I wrote The Jewel Bride: Or, The Girl Who Was Kind to Snakes, for my fourteen-year-old self.
