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.'
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
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Forever a chorister
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
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It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
