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In 1785 when Clara Reeve looked back seven or eight decades and recalled Mme d'Aulnoy as "a famous composer of Fairy Tales,"[1] she was correct in singling Mme d'Aulnoy out for special attention as an author of contes de fées, but she did not know that twenty-eight of the tales which came into England under Mme d'Aulnoy's name were by four other French writers. Nor has any other literary historian noticed this fact.[2] Furthermore, the 1699 edition of d'Aulnoy tales listed by Arundel Esdaile is regarded today as a bibliographical ghost.[3] In other words, except for the English collections of Fénelon's and Charles Perrault's fairy tales,[4] the French fairy tale in England is a subject fraught with bibliographical confusion. These problems stand in the way of a comprehensive study of the English vogue for French fairy tales in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
This vogue was in fact initiated by Mme d'Aulnoy in 1691 with the translation of a fairy tale of hers as The History of Adolphus, which appeared, however, without author's or translator's name and which was regarded until recently as a native English work and not a translation at all.[5] After this beginning and excepting the English versions of fairy tales by Fénelon and Perrault, the French conte de fée as a genre came to England in four collections, all of them said to be Mme d'Aulnoy's work. Only two are completely the work of Mme d'Aulnoy; the other two contain tales by other hands as well as tales by Mme d'Aulnoy. These four collections
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