The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde, and Other Stories

Princess Fiorimonde was beautiful, wicked, and utterly devoted to her own reflection. When suitors arrived seeking her hand, she consulted the old witch who had taught her magic, and together they devised a solution: each prince who dared to want her would become a bead on a string. One by one, they came. One by one, they vanished. The necklace grew heavier. Mary De Morgan's collection pulses with this same dark electricity, stories where magic is not kind, where beauty exacts terrible prices, where the line between transformation and destruction blurs entirely. These are Victorian fairy tales that remember what the form has always known: the things we desire most are often the things that undo us. Written by a woman who understood that female ambition, vanity, and refusal were subjects worthy of the genre's most ancient powers. The tales don't offer comfortable lessons or gentle resolutions. They offer something sharper: the recognition that wanting can be a form of devouring, and that some locks cannot be opened without losing what makes us human. For readers who know that the original fairy tales were not made for children, this collection is a mirror held up to those darker corners of wish and consequence.