[In the following review, Barron faults the selection of stories in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales and criticizes the use of the word “modern” in the title of the anthology.]

The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales is fey and sometimes feisty, but definitely a volume aimed at adults and not young children. Some of these stories would satisfy kids as bedtime beguilement, but there is an undertone of a peculiarly disturbing quality. “Modern fairy tales” is something of a misnomer. The first story in the book was written in 1839, and of the 40 stories, only 14 date from after the second world war. It is packed with princesses and frogs, dragons and demons, and strange countries where forests spring up at the drop of a comb and lakes appear through magical mirrors.

Alison Lurie has a fine sense of the magic of fairy tales, yet somehow the collection she has assembled here fails to enchant. The introduction is less than incisive, and mainly consists of plot summaries of the stories we are about to read. The stories themselves are good, if taken in moderation. Some are political allegories, such as Ruskin's The King of the Golden River or George MacDonald's The Light Princess, which is a philosophical spoof in the vein of Johnson's Rasselas.

The editing is haphazard and tends towards the American, as we see Dickens spelling “neighbour” without a “u”. “Modern” includes Sylvia Townsend Warner writing Bluebeard's Daughter in 1940, though the context for this makes it more interesting than its superficial content. These are writers looking to dreams and nightmares for modes of expression. There is a strong European element, of castles and kings as an escape from the chaos of war, and also, for the Americans, an identification with the homeland of the imagination.

Some of the more modern stories deal, as one would expect, with feminism and role reversal. Jay Williams' Petronella is an amusing tale of a princess who sets out to rescue a prince, finds him boring and goes off with a wizard. Jeanne Desy's The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet is similarly inclined, and there are some delightful oddities, such as Richard Kennedy's The Porcelain Man, a subversive and surreal story of a man made of china who is constantly changing his shape in the hands of his mistress.

Sexuality hums through some of this writing, often in dark forms, as it does in all good fairy stories. Some are simply anodyne and morally instructive for children, in which girls are sugar and spice and bad little boys are punished. I would have expected Alison Lurie to offer more comment about this. In her novel Foreign Affairs, she had a character researching folklore who is shocked when children in the playground point to their bodies chanting “milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner chocolate's made”.

The collection could have done with more such earthiness; as it is, it steers a haphazard course between bedtime reading and social politics. Flora Thompson wrote in Lark Rise to Candleford about the impossibility of ever recapturing the magic of her mother's stories; once the tale is retold, the Aladdin's cave vanishes. For the adult reader, the cumulative effect is to feel you are living on a diet of strawberry milkshakes in a land where the never-never should have been explained.

Perhaps, in the end, that is Lurie's point, though she doesn't go into it here. Angela Carter's rather staid The Courtship of Mr Lyon is included, along with Joan Aiken's much more bizarre The Man Who Had Seen the Rope Trick, a sophisticated story that would charm anyone who enjoys trickery and mind-bending games. But where does “modern” begin? Lurie has no definition for it, and this arbitrary selection lacks a purpose.