"With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar
opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to
charm twenty-one times, and counting."
--Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her
cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all
over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we
know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to
make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural
touchstone--the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that
divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal
persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of
jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to
life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in
unforgettable variations across countries and cultures.
"Fascinating...A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty,
jealousy, and maternal persecution."
--Wall Street Journal
"Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest,
the most mythopoeic of them all?...Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal
of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale...a feast
of rich thoughts...An exciting and authoritative anthology from the
wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale."
--Marina Warner
"The inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters
and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than
we imagine when we say 'Snow White.'"
--Honor Moore
"Shocking yet familiar, these stories...retain the secret whisper of
storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book."
--Literary Review
