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Foreword by the Author

This story was written many moons ago under an apple tree in an orchard in Kent, which is one of England’s prettiest counties.

It was springtime and I was staying with a school friend whose parents owned an old manor house that was full of pictures and books: books for grown-ups and books for children. Among the latter I was delighted to discover some that I knew well, for I had once had a whole set of these myself, only to lose them when a London warehouse, in which most of our family belongings had been stored after my father died, caught fire and burned to the ground.

They were the Andrew Lang fairy books, which Lang had compiled from stories that he had collected from all over the world. From China and India, Persia and Arabia, France, Britain and Spain, Germany, Russia and the Netherlands, and, in fact, from anywhere where generations of people have told their children fairy tales at bedtime—which means practically everywhere!

Nowadays The Blue Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, and so on, right through the list of colors, are collector’s items that fetch high prices at book auctions. Their charming illustrations were mostly the work of an artist called H. J. Ford, and I had admired them so much, particularly the colored ones, that I had made up my mind at a very early age that I too would be an illustrator of children’s books when I grew up.

During the next few days I reread most of them, and it was only after I had read at least twenty of the stories that I noticed something that had never struck me before—I suppose because I had always taken it for granted. All the princesses, apart from such rare exceptions as Snow White, were blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful, with lovely figures and complexions and extravagantly long hair. This struck me as most unfair, and suddenly I began to wonder just how many handsome young princes would have asked a king for the hand of his daughter if that daughter had happened to be gawky, snub-nosed, and freckled, with shortish mouse-colored hair? None, I suspected. They would all have been off chasing after some lissome Royal Highness with large blue eyes and yards of golden hair and probably nothing whatever between her ears!