I'm trying to identify the author and title of a short collection of original fairy tales that I owned as a child. I had the book in the US around 1974
or 1975, but my copy was battered by the time I got it -- someone had given it to me used as a gift -- and it may have been published long before then, and
in just about any English-speaking country.
The book was a slim hardback with a red cover. It had at least three stories in it, and maybe more. The quality of the writing was outstanding, and my
mother's memory is that it had beautiful illustrations also.
I can remember three stories from the book and the order they came in:
The first story in the book was about a princess and a labyrinth or maze; there is some party or event about to happen, and a prince or other young man
comes to the princess's castle and either she rescues him or he rescues her in a maze in the dark. Not the Ariadne story as I recall -- much lighter in
tone.
The (or a) middle story was about a stubborn farm girl who ends up magically a bit like Cinderella: she imagines herself to be mistreated by her hard-working family, and when she receives an invitation to a party in town where a rich merchant's son will choose his bride, but is forbidden to go (the family's wagon is needed at home), she walks there on her own. She has no party dress, but she makes herself one as she goes from flowers that grow along the side of the road, and trims the sleeves and hems with Queen Anne's Lace. When she arrives, the flower dress magically turns real (including the lace trim) and she is the belle of the party.
The final story in the book was about a princess who lives in a castle with her indulgent father, the king. While rummaging around one day she finds an old full-length mirror in the palace attic and brings it down into the palace itself. The mirror turns out to reflect the inner nature, not the outward appearance, of everyone who looks in it, which proves so uncomfortable that the mirror is promptly packed up again and returned right back to the attic. The Prime Minister or Lord High Chamberlain features prominently (probably as an outwardly ugly person --with excessive warts? -- who's so nice that he looks wonderful in the mirror). This was again a very light story -- not moralizing.
My memory from the language is that the stories, although geared towards young children, were literary, were probably from the 20th C (there was a subtle undercurrent of feminism to them), and were more likely by a Canadian or a Brit than by an American. I had already read tons of Oscar Wilde and Hans Christian Anderson and E. Nesbit by then, along with Andrew Lang and the Grimm brothers, and I'm pretty sure that I'd have known the difference between original stories and retellings of folk stories.I think that one of the stories (about a mirror) was the title story, and I know that for some reason I thought that the title itself was beautiful. I want to say that it was called something like "The Mirror and Other Lovely Tales," or "The Mirror: Three Tales of Beauty," but a search with those keywords has never brought anything up. I wonder too if it might not have had an author listed, because it was my favorite book for a long time and I don't remember anything about the author at all.
One final clue: a poster to ABE's Booksleuth UK remembered reading the mirror story as a stand-alone picture book in England in the early to mid 1970s, but couldn't remember the title or author. Her Mom remembered that it had a purple cover with "swirly patterns" on it and that it had very beautiful, rich illustrations. Her Mom had found it in a hospital back then and read it to her son who was sick there -- the son thankfully got better, and it sounds as though the family remembers the story as having helped at that tough time and was hoping to find it again.
If anyone has any ideas on either the little red hardback with all of the stories or the stand-alone UK picture book about the mirror, I'd be so grateful.
