'Rejoice together in a happy ending'

Nursery favourite Ruth Manning-Sanders believed it was every child's birthright to enter a world of enchantment and occasional terrors, where good always triumphs over evil

- Matthew Dennison

No matter what terrifying trials, Ruth Manning-Sanders's heroes and heroines always win

POET-TURNED-FOLKLORIST Ruth Manning-Sanders understood the powerful attraction of fairy tales for readers. 'In the end,' she wrote in the foreword to A Book of Princes and Princesses, published in 1969, ‘it all comes right: the enemy is defeated, the princess freed, and the prince may sheathe his sword; the prince and princess can get married and settle down together to live happily ever after.' Manning-Sanders was well placed to reach a judgement. Beginning 60 years ago, she published more than 20 well-received anthologies of fairy tales.

The writer was already in her mid-seventies when she embarked on the series of titles for Methuen that earned her a place on nursery bookshelves across the English-speaking world. From the outset, she cast her net wide. Helped in her research by her artist daughter Joan, she gathered fairy tales from different continents and epochs, from the 12th-century Kashmiri story she re-wrote as Stupid-Head to an Inuit tale called The Caribou Wife and, from Madagascar, The Monster with Seven Heads.

Humour and warmth characterized her retellings; her prose style was deceptively simple, its apparent sparseness learned in the pre-war years in which poetry was her chief focus. True to the didacticism that was a feature of much age-old storytelling, Manning-Sanders offered punishments to malefactors, reassurance and rewards to the pure in heart. 'In the fairy-tale world,' she told her young readers, 'however powerful and ugly the evil may be, that evil can never finally stand its ground against the valor of the brave, the good, and the beautiful.'