Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales (version 2)

These are the originals. Before Disney sanitized them, before they became bedtime defaults, Charles Perrault gathered these tales from oral tradition and gave them their first sophisticated literary form in 17th-century France. Here you will find Sleeping Beauty awakened not by true love's kiss alone but by the birth of her children, and Bluebeard's castle of horrors, and Cinderella's glass slipper made not of magic glass but of polished fur. Arthur Quiller-Couch's translations preserve Perrault's elegant prose, its wit and wicked undertone intact. These are stories about what happens when wishes come true and the price is paid. They endure because they speak to something deep in us: the terror and beauty of growing up, of wanting, of being trapped and breaking free.