The Tales of Mother Goose

Eight stories here did more to shape the modern fairy tale than any book before them. Charles Perrault, retired from decades of royal service, took plots that French nursemaids had told for generations and rewrote them for the salons of Louis XIV’s Paris: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and three more. He kept the old bones and added courtly polish, glass slippers, and a verse moral at the end of each tale, usually sly and sometimes cheerfully cynical about husbands, wives, and ambition. The Grimms came a century later. These came first. This free PDF and EPUB edition carries the classic English translation.