Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales

About the Book

Sleeping beauties? Not Clever Gretchen or Kate Crackernuts or Manka or any of the other young heroines in this wonderful collection of folktales. Active, witty, brave, and resourceful, these girls and young women can fight and hunt, defeat giants, answer riddles, outwit the Devil, and rescue friends and family from all sorts of dangers and evil spells. These stories and many others like them were gathered by scholars from all the countries of Europe, but are usually left out of the popular collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when women were supposed to be beautiful, innocent, and passive.

About the Author

Allison Lurie is the author of nine novels, including Foreign Affairs (Pulitzer Prize 1985) and a collection of short stories, Women and Ghosts. She has also published two non-fiction books on children?s literature, Don?t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and is the editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales and American Fairy Tales.