The best books on the psychological power of fairy stories and fables

Several reviewers of my book referred to Angela Carter, so I decided to revisit my collection after many years.

A rich and chilling retelling of my childhood nightmare story Bluebeard heads Angela Carter’s collection. Carter delights in the gruesome and gory detail, the blood-soaked keys, the dripping corpses. When I was a child I was terrified of the illustration in my fairy tale book of a hanging row of girls in beautiful blood-stained gowns, I couldn’t read the actual story, I was too frightened, but time and again I returned to that vivid illustration, horribly fascinated. Now, many years later, I read The Bloody Chamber and understood the compulsive near-madness of the heroine. All of these retellings of fairy tales are well worth visiting.

I was given this book thirty years ago by an Indian poet, who promised me I would love it. It is a feast of stories, told to the central character Devi throughout her life. Through her grandmother’s ancient stories, she learns about love, beauty, riches, and womanhood. Her father-in-law tells her stories that teach her about life, how to survive her lonely marriage, how to belong. Stories and dreams give her wealth and power, but they evaporate and still she is there, empty, alone, and desperate for the love that the old stories are about. 

Two other women’s stories weave through the narrative. Her mother Seta, and her husband’s old retainer, Mayamma share exotic tales of ancient India, Gods, mysteries, magic, and rituals. 

The Thousand Faces of Night is trancelike and beautiful.

"I am a story," Aycayia tells her young friend Reggie. She is a mermaid who loses her tail; a sea creature who is dragged to land after thousands of years in the ocean, and who falls in love with a fisherman. But she’s trapped in her own story, and the curse that swept her away from her own ancient people has to be unravelled and broken. Aycacia yearns for the sea, and yearns equally for the love of David, her fisherman. He saves her from near-suicide, but the curse of her story remains.

This story was recommended to me because it resembles one of my own novels. Around the world, in folk tales and songs, there are many such tales of sea-creatures, sirens, selkies, mermen, mermaids,

This Caribbean version is moving, mysterious, and very well crafted.

I first came across the Russian folk story that this novel is based on when I was a child. "The Little Daughter of the Snow" was my absolute favourite story in Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Stories. 

In Eowin Ivey’s book, Mabel and Jack have lost their only child. They try to make a new life among the forests and snows of Alaska. They build a little girl of snow, which melts, but a real child, Faina, emerges from the woods and they take her in as their own. They love her desperately, but their nights are haunted by darkness and fears, dreams of dead babies, and their knowledge of the Russian fairy tale. Faina yearns to live in the snow, where she belongs. It’s a beautifully atmospheric book about enchantment, darkness, and love.

This is not a novel, but an extraordinary exploration of fairy stories, their meaning and their psychological significance. Women who run with the Wolves is an amazing work of scholarship, though it’s sometimes simplistic, and takes some digesting. Clarissa Pinkora Estes is herself a fine storyteller. Each section begins with her retelling of a well-known fairy story, sparse, unadorned, and very powerful. She then writes about its meaning, referring to psychological conditions that are related to the story. She maintains that understanding the story helps us to understand ourselves, our motives and fears, our inhibitions, and how we might move forwards. Fascinating and thought-provoking book.