The Robe of Sincerity

Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon (1664-1734), a relative of the better-known Charles Perrault, was among the most important creators of the fairy tales genre. This ground-breaking collection gathers four stories originally published in 1696, a year before Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose, the classic The Dark Tower and the Luminous Days published in 1705, as well as an essay written in the form of a letter, in which Mlle L’Héritier casts more light on the detail of her thinking, the process by which the tales came to be written and the various things that she was attempting to achieve. These stories may well be the source material that inspired Cinderella and the Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin, amongst others, and are not an adaptation of folklore, but an attempt to recycle literary inventions attributed to the medieval troubadours.