Fairy & Folktales

London, Constable, 1936.

First edition, first impression. Presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.

A collection of tales, fables, ballads and verse, with a short play, which Naomi Mitchison described (as the jacket quotes) as "stories about Between-ness which happen in the Debateable Land, the uncharted marches between here and Fairy Land". Traditional tales are reworked for the 1930s: the title story is a dark sequel to "The Three Little Pigs"; there are new versions of "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Little Mermaid"; a witch's Rolls-Royce draws up in Corporation Street, Birmingham, to lure the children of unemployed workmen to "the dangerous house of Capital"; the Snow Maiden lives in the back street of a commercial town and marries a commercial traveller; and the play Kate Crackernuts deals with fairy abduction. The SF Encyclopedia notes the book's use of fantasy for allegory. It was reissued by Princeton University Press in its "Oddly Modern Fairy Tales" series, with an introduction by Marina Warner.

A presentation copy, inscribed "Gerald, with love from Naomi, as always", with "(Heard)" added above the name in a different hand. Gerald Heard (1889–1971), writer and philosopher and the BBC's first science commentator, was a mentor to Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, and emigrated to the United States with the Huxleys in 1937. Mitchison was a friend of his and took part in his Engineers' Study Group (founded 1931), but their friendship ended after 1936 when they disagreed over the Spanish Civil War: Mitchison backed the Republicans, while Heard refused to take sides in any war. The book was published in 1936, shortly before the break.