Fairy tales have always been rather grim and murderous, even before the Brothers Grimm complied their collection in 1812. “Fairytale” was a term coined by Marie-Catharine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy. Also known as Comtesse d’Aulnoy. She published in French many fairytales including Finette Cindron, or Cunning Cinders (1697). A tale that is better known as Cinderella. In this rendition, Finette Cindron’s royal parents attempt to abandon their three daughters so that they cannot find their way home. Luckily, Finette Cindron’s fairy godmother has given her a string that helps the princesses find their way home. Undeterred, their mother decides to take them on an even longer journey and abandons them again. And then again until they are lost in a far off land with ogres. The Ogre and Ogress decide to use the princesses as servants until they are ready to eat them. Clever Finette manages to burn the Ogre in the oven, cut off the Ogress’s head, and escape with her two sisters.
Charles Perrault’s famous, Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of My Mother Goose was published that same year in French (1697). It included the stories: Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Little Thumb, The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots, Riquet of the Tuft, Blue Beard, The Fairy, and Little Red Riding Hood. In the story of “Blue Beard”, he forbids his wife to open a closet door while he is gone, but her curiosity overcomes her and opens it with a key and sees that “the floor was all covered over with clotted blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women, ranged against the walls.” His wife realizes that these were her husband’s previous wives that he married and then murdered.
Despite the fact that fairy tales were grim and often violent, they were read to children in the eighteenth century to teach morals. In “Little Red Riding Hood” by Charles Perrault, Mother Goose explains that: “The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are / Of every sort, and every character.” Young ladies are warned not to trust wolfish young men who are “artful, tho’ their true designs they hide.”
In Once Upon a Murder, set in 1785, Miss Tiffany Woodall is now the official librarian for the Duchess of Beaufort. She is also tasked with teaching the young duke until a suitable governess is found. A true librarian, she purchases children’s books for charge, including fairy tales. However, Tiffany is horrified to find herself in a real-life fairy tale when she discovers a dead body in front of her cottage in the woods.
