Abstract
In the 1970s both Alison Lurie and her critics seemed to assume that fairy tales give us powerful, often damaging images of women which women must adopt or resist. But recent women’s autobiographies often reveal a more oblique and complex relationship to fairytale patterns and imagery. Both Christa Wolf in her Kindheitsmuster (1976) and Carolyn Steedman in her Landscape for a Good Woman (1985) find broken reflections of their experiences in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. They repeatedly return to fragments of well-known tales that mirror a layered, inconsistent, even unknowable self.
Recommended Citation
Wanning Harries, Elizabeth. "The Mirror Broken: Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales." Marvels & Tales 14.1 (2000). Web. <https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol14/iss1/5>.
