Eve Mason (Queen’s College undergraduate) has published five previously untranslated German nineteenth-century fairy tales by women writers in an anthology, A String of Pearls, funded by the Oxford German sub-faculty’s LIDL Year Abroad Project grant. As well as the tales appearing here in English for the first time, the anthology is illustrated by professional artist Susan Sansome and includes an introduction by Eve, and a foreword by Oxford academic Dr Joanna Neilly, author of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination (2016).
Eve’s project aims to recover and revitalize some of the lost voices of the hundreds of German women who wrote and published fairy tales in the nineteenth century but have since been forgotten, women who used the genre as a subversive vehicle for critique of patriarchal values and conventions. The stories she has translated feature the classic fairytale characters of adventurous children, wicked queens, handsome princes and talking animals, but also some figures that don’t seem quite so familiar: a wise, educated ruling queen; a powerful, vengeful nymph; not a knight in shining armour, but a brave young woman ready to save a sleeping prince.