Andrew Lang

The Blue Fairy Book of 1889 did well enough for Longmans, Green to keep the series running for a quarter of a century, and Andrew Lang put his name to twenty-five volumes, The Yellow Fairy Book among them in 1894. Much of the labour was his wife's. Leonora Blanche Lang, known as Nora, translated and rewrote most of the stories out of French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Catalan, a debt he acknowledged in his prefaces. Lang (1844-1912) was born in Selkirk, took a first in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and made his living in London as a critic, poet and journalist. He translated the Odyssey with S. H. Butcher in 1879 and the Iliad with Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers in 1883, and his retelling of The Arabian Nights Entertainments appeared in 1898. He led the Folklore Society from 1888 and was elected to the British Academy in 1906.