[In the following review, Warner finds Lurie's selections in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales somewhat arbitrary due to the volume's lack of unifying linguistic, literary, or historical context.]

Children play adult games (pretending to be the Mafia in Sicily, Jack the Ripper in London). Fairy-tales, as a branch of literature, frequently represent the reverse: grown-ups pretending childlikeness in order to make things better. Novalis wrote in his notebooks, “a child is good deal cleverer and wiser than an adult—but the child must be an ironic child”. This kind of child, he continued, could tell stories that were “a prophetic account of things—an ideal account”: fairy-tale. Masked as a young, clever and wise innocent, the writer could imagine the ideal in fantasies; play-acting a child who is an ideal child, the teller of fairy stories could produce a special flavour of irony—the wishful thinking of Utopia.

Alison Lurie's selection of forty-one fairy-tales [in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales] develops the idea of the genre as this kind of social parable, working at several registers, from the eldritch (Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Song of the Morrow”) to the cheerfully loony (Carl Sandburg). In the earliest tale, “Uncle David's Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies” (1839), by Catherine Sinclair, the sound of chalk on blackboard is never far off; the last, Louise Erdrich's “Old Man Potchikoo” (1989), offers by contrast a raunchy—and poignant—rag-bag of trickster anecdotes clearly drawn from the oral tradition of Erdrich's Chippewa relations. To some degree, these last stories return the fairy-tale to the anonymous, collective authorship which gave the genre its authority to speak for general yearnings and fears in the first place.

As Jack Zipes has argued in many critical writings since his pioneering book Breaking the Magic Spell (1975), individual writers such as Ruskin (in “The King of the Golden River”) and Frank L. Baum (in his sequence of Oz stories) sought to challenge prevailing ideas about money and marriage and justice through imagining an alternative, disruptive version in fairy-tales. This argument has altered attitudes to the form in the past twenty years or so and significantly raised its standing. Pedagogical realists, who used to denounce sternly the false promises of fairy-tales and their conventional peasant pieties about love and marriage and social hierarchy and money, are heard less loudly today, and the genre more often presents the spectacle of a rich piece of common land, ready to graze and to stock anew. Certainly the filmmakers are flocking there in the wake of the writers, and, on the evidence of Beauty and the Beast (and even Jurassic Park), they are acutely aware of the genre's potential to convey and recast current ideas about gender, about ecology, about politics.

Here, in Lurie's collection, the Utopian impulse finds that love can breathe life into a cruel-hearted wooden doll (Richard Hughes's “Gertrude's Child”), that greed will bring a rich man down (the practical Juliana Horatia Ewing, in a story of 1882, the poetic Jane Yolen a hundred years later), and that a princess can learn to stand on her own two feet (Jeanne Desy). Some tales dramatize satisfying revenge fantasies, others right wrongs through metamorphoses and disappearances (a vivid story of the war between the elves and the trolls from Philip K. Dick); the princes do not fade away, but in the age of enterprising heroines, change character: in Richard Kennedy's “The Porcelain Man”, the prince is finally turned into a set of dishes on which the princess and her new husband dine.

As she fully acknowledges in her preface, Lurie's choices as well as her conception of the genre follows in large part two recent anthologies by Jack Zipes, his Victorian Fairy Tales (1987) and Spells of Enchantment (1991). His Victorian collection rediscovered forgotten writers and presented remembered ones in a new light; six of his stories reappear here, including Dickens's exuberant tale “The Magic Fishbone”, with its brilliant nursery-rhyme cumulative sentences, spilling together grim realities and fairy-tale conventions:

The Princess Alicia kept the seventeen young Princes and Princesses quiet, and dressed and undressed and danced the baby, and made the kettle boil, and heated the soup, and swept the hearth, and poured out the medicine, and nursed the Queen, and did all that ever she could, and was as busy busy busy, as busy can be.

Zipes's volume focused on an English movement, which could be dubbed radical fabulism, beginning with Swift and current still with Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie; Lurie's Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, on the other hand, does not offer any historical or literary context, nor does it attempt to place the tales in relation to earlier or contemporary European practitioners (D'Aulnoy, Hoffmann, Tieck). It also seems arbitrary to observe linguistic boundaries, and then include only North American and British writers in English. The introduction gives only a perfunctory account of each tale, and the notes only the most tantalizing glimpses of the writers: “Frances Browne … became blind as an infant. Yet in spite of these handicaps she managed to get an education … became a popular poet … leavened with wit. …” More, please, of this true-life fairy-tale.

One of the most remarkable—and disturbing—stories, “The New Mother”, by Lucy Lane Clifford, tells of a fey music-maker who bewitches two (good) children until they become so naughty that their mother leaves them and sends another in her place, who has glass eyes and a wooden tail. The children barricade themselves in:

but presently, the two children heard through the thin wooden door the new mother move a little, and then say to herself—“I must break open the door with my tail.”

For one terrible moment all was still, but in it the children could almost hear her lift up her tail and then, with a fearful blow, the little painted door was cracked and splintered.

This is the authentic frisson of the wolf in Red Riding Hood, of the Sandman in Hoffmann; few paediatricians today would approve its naked threat to naughty children. It focuses a question that hangs over the whole Oxford Book. Presented with a Maxfield Parrish jacket illustration of “The Reluctant Dragon”, that looks a little like a 1960s record cover, it seems to be aiming at young readers. Tales explicitly written to mould unformed minds, then and now, are included, from Ruskin to Jay Williams's “Petronella”, a spirited revision from a vintage period of feminist children's rewritings (1973). Yet few children now are used to reading a book this thick and this varied; some of the stories would amuse, many more (Donald Barthelme, Carter) would baffle.

The collection isn't a book for children, but a book for readers who would like to be. Ultimately, they must follow the writers, and become “ironic children” too, losing themselves in the pleasurable make believe that history and society still lie ahead, waiting to be changed into fairy-tale.