Items related to Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy...
Most people know the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, but very few know that behind the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales stood a network of sisters-and mothers, neighbors, and female friends. In this intimate history, Valerie Paradiz tells the real story of the greatest literary collaboration of the nineteenth century, and gives the long-lost narrators of these beloved tales their due. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were major German intellects of their time, contemporaries of both Goethe and Schiller. But as Paradiz reveals here, the romantic image of the two brothers traveling the countryside, transcribing tales told to them by peasants, is far from the truth. More than half of the tales the Grimm brothers collected were contributed by women friends from the upper classes. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the high years of German romanticism, Clever Maids chronicles this most fascinating enterprise in literary history, and illuminates the ways the Grimm tales-with their mythic portrayals of courage, sacrifice, and betrayal-still resonate so powerfully today.
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About the Author:
Valerie Paradiz holds a Ph.D. in German Studies and has taught at Bard College. She is the author of Elijah's Cup, as well as numerous translations. She lives in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.
From Publishers Weekly:
Contrary to popular myth, the Brothers Grimm collected their stories not from peasants but from educated young women in their locale of Kassel, Westphalia. Paradiz (Elijah's Cup) has researched the lives of these feminine "fairytale think tanks" to whom the philologist brothers Grimm were so indebted. In doing so, she also details the family life of six Grimm children and their mother's struggles after the premature death of their lawyer father. Sketching in broad terms the Romantic German nationalist aims of the Grimm stories, Paradiz notes the irony that several of the tales were of French origin, having traveled to Germany through Huguenot immigration. She devotes a chapter to each woman contributor, among them the sullen lone Grimm sister, Lotte, burdened with the family's household chores; the much loved girl-next-door, Dortchen Wild, who contributed "Rumplestiltskin" and later married Wilhelm; the upper-class Hassenpflug sisters, who contributed a variety of tales, including "Puss in Boots" and "Little Red Riding Hood." Paradiz interestingly recounts how the Grimm brothers perceived some female contributors as threatening and unfeminine, while lauding others for their submissive, helpful personalities, and she mines the women's contributions for possible deviations from male stereotypes of the time. While her analysis is too tentative to amount to a coherent thesis, this accessible book brings unsung heroines of literature to light and will inform readers of women's history and literature.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication date1905
- ISBN 10 1422351688
- ISBN 13 9781422351680
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages222
- Rating
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