The Celtic Myths That Shape the Way We Think

Abstract

thesis, with somewhat undigested commentary from earlier critical writings on fairy-tale and gender studies. Translations from French and German are careful, but not always fluent, and the editor of the English tales has explained certain words unhelpfully: in Egerton’s ‘Virgin Soil’, the betrayed wife says that her husband ‘has gone to Paris with a girl from the Alhambra’, to which the footnote reads ‘The Alhambra is a palace and fortress located in Granada, Andalusia, Spain’ (354). True—but more relevantly, it was the name of a London music hall: the husband has run off with an actress, not a Spanish princess. Overall, however, Women Writing Wonder is a valuable collection, bringing together some neglected authors and little-known tales, and effectually making the point that Angela Carter and other twentieth-century rebels against folkloric stereotypes were not breaking entirely new ground.