Two centuries later, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Andrew and Nora Lang, among others, published their own collections. What is certain is that Perrault’s heroines on the whole are not bold, but weak and helpless.
Who can say why the male writer flourished and the female writers are largely forgotten? Possibly because the female writers' more elaborate style of writing, and much longer stories, fell out of favour, while Perrault, writing for his children, had a friendlier and simpler style. Lesley Sims, Editor of Forgotten Fairy Tales of Brave and Brilliant Girls
Stories from Times Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose has retellings of the stories everyone knows: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots and Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper. Instead, it is Charles Perrault, writing around the same time, whose collection became famous. But these women and the collections they published are now largely unknown. Many of the storytellers were female – Madame d’Aulnoy, Madame de Villeneuve, the Comtesse du Murat to name just three – and they often wrote about bold heroines trying to escape the conventions of their age. In France, it became the fashion among the upper class for fairy tales to be told in a witty, conversational style to amuse adults. Once again, the tales were retold to suit their times but now the ideals of those times were fixed within them, pinned to the page with the stories. Then in 17 th century Europe, people began to write down the stories in collections and the tales took on a more solid form. For thousands of years, fairy tales were told orally, dancing across borders and down the generations, changing to suit the places and times of the teller.
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