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A drop of bitterness: Andersen's fairy tales

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From: The Hudson Review
Date: 20020101
Author:Lewis, Tess

There are not many people now, perhaps there are none, who can write really good fairy tales, because they do not believe enough in their own stories, and because they want to be wittier than it has pleased Heaven to make them.

-Andrew Lang, The Green Fairy Book (1892)

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, who died seventeen years before Andrew Lang's lament, was the last great writer of fairy tales. Andersen certainly believed deeply in his stories, many of which have obvious autobiographical sources, and he was, both in conversation and in his tales, a genuinely witty man. While Charles Perrault and ...

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