Donoghue, Emma
Donoghue, Emma (1969– ),Irish novelist, playwright, and scholar. Donoghue's Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) is a series of linked retellings of twelve well‐known fairy tales. One character in each tale becomes the narrator of the next; for example, the fairy godmother in ‘The Tale of a Shoe’ (a ‘Cinderella’ variant) tells the next tale, ‘The Tale of a Bird’ (a ‘Bluebeard’ variant) as her own. Donoghue disrupts the usual patterns of heterosexual desire; in these tales princesses often ignore princes to fall in love with fairy godmothers, stepmothers, and even with witches—older, powerful women usually portrayed as threatening or evil in the fairy‐tale canon. The thirteenth story, ‘The Tale of the Kiss’, told by a cave‐dwelling witch, is not a variant of any traditional tale; it is deliberately inconclusive, enlisting the reader in...
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