Fairy Tales

The little mermaid who gives up her voice for a pair of legs, the ugly duckling mocked by the farmyard, the little match girl on a freezing New Year's Eve, the emperor whose new clothes do not exist, the steadfast tin soldier and the snow queen with her splinter of ice: this collection gathers the tales that made Hans Christian Andersen the most loved storyteller of the nineteenth century.

Andersen, a poor shoemaker's son from Odense in Denmark, wrote more than a hundred and fifty tales, and unlike the folk stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, most were his own inventions. Many end sadly, and they are as much about loneliness and longing as about magic.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman in Odense, Denmark. At fourteen he went alone to Copenhagen to become a singer or an actor, failed at both, and was saved by patrons who sent him to school. He wrote novels, plays and travel books, but his fame came from the tales he began publishing in 1835.

Stories like The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling, many drawn from his own sense of being an outsider, have been translated into more languages than almost any other books. His Fairy Tales are in the library. He once stayed so long as a guest in Charles Dickens's house that Dickens pinned a note to the mirror after he left.