Mary De Morgan
3 books
- Odd little Victorian fairy tales with a sly bite, framed as stories the pins and brooches on a pincushion tell each other at night. The Toy Princess alone, where a court prefers a polite clockwork girl to the real one, is worth the hour it takes.
- You’d enjoy this if you like fairy tales with a thorn in them: Princess Fiorimonde turns the princes who court her into pearls for her necklace, and the story feels spare, strange, and quietly cruel. It’s not cozy bedtime magic, but it has a sharp Victorian bite.
- Original Victorian fairy tales, not retellings, from a writer who told them aloud to the children of the Morris and Burne-Jones circle. Clear, slightly melancholy telling, gentler than her poisoned-necklace Fiorimonde but from the same hand.