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Good Reading : December 2017
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UP CLOSE FEISTY WOMEN OF FOLKLORE E Most of us grew up with fairytales in which ma male characters got to do most – if not all – of the swashbuckling, princess-saving an and other acts of derring-do. But as K the Wise, brings , brings these kick-ass female figures to the fore. We asked Kate to tell us about the book. All of the stories in Vasilisa the Wise are based on ‘little-known tales’. Where did you discover these obscure fairytales? Lorena – the illustrator of the book – and I have been collecting and studying fairytales for years, and each tale was important to us for different reasons. I first discovered the story of ‘Katie Crackernuts’ (an old Orkney tale) when I was in Scotland with my family. I bought a version of it in a cobwebby old second-hand bookshop. Lorena knew the story of the Prince-Serpent, which comes from Norway, but I had never read it before. ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ is a beautiful German version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which I found while studying the Grimm Brothers for my doctorate in fairytale studies. It has a far more active heroine than the original French version and I always thought it was a shame it was not better known. At what point did you become frustrated with the trope that fairytale princesses always need to be saved? So many people base their understanding of the genre on Disney movies, and in particular on the earliest retellings the studio made between 18 GOOD READING DECEMBER 2017 / JANUARY 2018 1937 and 1959, or they remember the dreadful Ladybird Classics published from 1964 onwards. For years I’ve tried to point out that Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – in which the princess has only 18 lines of dialogue – does not reflect the mythic roots of this ancient tale, in which the princess is a powerful force for life and resurrection. ‘Rapunzel’ is routinely criticised for being ‘a passive princess waiting for her prince’, even though in the original story she actually saves the prince from blindness and helps the witch find redemption. Most people also only know the tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, all of whom retold older tales in a patriarchal mode, draining the power of agency from the heroines. That’s why a project like Vasilisa the Wise and Other Tales of Brave Young Women is so exciting; we have the chance to bring the lost and forgotten stories of female empowerment back to contemporary readers. Vasilisa the Wise and Other Tales of Brave Young Women retold by Kate Forsyth and illustrated by Lorena Carrington is published by Serenity Press, rrp $29.99. GOODREADINGMAGAZINE.COM.AU KATE FORSYTH explains, there have a always been empowered female characters in folklore, and her new collection of retold tales, Vasilisa ich all
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