Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books: His First Preface Omits Mrs. Lang

What did Lang’s prefaces say about Mrs. Lang?

The Lilac preface goes on to describe Lang’s own part by way of Mark Twain’s Adam and Eve: “Eve worked, Adam superintended. I also superintend.” Then he spelled it out: “I find out where the stories are, and advise, and, in short, superintend,” adding in italics, “I do not write the stories out of my own head.”

He had said much the same in the Violet Fairy Book of 1901, where the Editor “is not the author of the stories in the Fairy Books,” and in the Crimson of 1903, where the found tales “are adapted to the needs of British children by various hands.”

A preface is not a work diary. It shows what its writer chose to say, so these sentences prove what Lang claimed rather than how the work was actually shared out. The twelve prefaces can still be set against each other, because Lang signed every one of them and each names, in its own words, the people he wished to thank for the translating.

The title page of 1889 names only the editor and the two artists: it reads “Edited by Andrew Lang,” with numerous illustrations “by H. J. Ford and G. P. Jacomb Hood,” and none of the six translators thanked in the preface appears there. The seven later title pages in the texts read here follow the same pattern, with Lang as editor and Ford as illustrator.

Who was Leonora Blanche Lang, and when did the books appear?

The prefaces never give Mrs. Lang a first name. The German national authority file, known as the GND, records her as Leonora Blanche Lang, 1851 to 1933, with the variant name Alleyne, Leonora Blanche, and one of its records adds that she translated and adapted stories for children together with her husband. The same authority file gives Andrew Lang the dates 1844 to 1912 and a birthplace in County Selkirk, in the Scottish Borders.

Mrs. Lang did appear as an author elsewhere. The advertisement pages of the 1910 Lilac list two titles in the same series as “By Mrs. Lang,” The Book of Princes and Princesses and The Red Book of Heroes. The prefaces also thank a Miss Alma Alleyne and a Miss Thyra Alleyne, and a “Miss Lang” appears in two of them, but the books do not say how any of these women were related to her, and this page does not guess.

Lang’s own name stood on other old tales too. In 1887 the title page of a London reprint of William Adlington’s Cupid and Psyche promised “a Discourse on the Fable By Andrew Lang.” That is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which Lang introduced in that 1887 reprint.

The twelve books, with years, sources and Mrs. Lang’s credit, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Prefaces and title pages of the twelve Fairy Books (Wikisource; Project Gutenberg); Internet Archive and hbz library records; retrieved 2026-11-04

In words: Blue 1889, Red 1890, Green by 1893, Yellow 1894, Pink 1897, Grey 1900, Violet 1901, Crimson 1903, Brown 1904, Orange 1906, Olive 1907, Lilac 1910.

Seven of these years come from a title or copyright page in the texts read here, four from library records of early copies, and the Green from a later edition. The Green’s own preface puts it third, after the Blue and the Red, and the Yellow preface of 1894 counts “the Blue, the Red, the Green, and here is the Yellow.” No dated first edition of the Green was found, but a library record dates a second edition to 1893.

Whose names do the twelve prefaces print?

Each name below is one the preface gives as translating, adapting, condensing or otherwise doing tales for that particular book. Lang’s three mentions of himself as “the Editor” are left out of the count, and so are the collectors, authors and publishers whose versions a book used or who allowed it to use them, such as Robert Chambers, whose Popular Traditions of Scotland the Blue draws on, or Mr. Fairbridge, whose tales collected in Rhodesia are in the Orange.

Names are kept exactly as printed, so “Miss Wright” and “Miss Minnie Wright” stay apart, the Yellow’s “Miss Alma” is left without a surname, and “Mr. Craigie” is not merged with “Mr. W. A. Craigie.”

The retellers and other credits in the twelve prefaces, with the preface’s words, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Prefaces of the twelve Fairy Books, edited by Andrew Lang (Wikisource; Project Gutenberg), retrieved 2026-11-04

Of the 55 credits, 48 name a Miss or a Mrs., and only the Craigie credits (“Mr. Craigie” once, “Mr. W. A. Craigie” twice) and Major Campbell’s four break the pattern. Mrs. Lang is named in 11 prefaces and Miss Blackley in 7, more often than any other reteller. From the Red to the Grey, Mrs. Lang is one name in a list: the Green preface of the early 1890s thanks “the ladies,” six of them, who translated “many of the tales,” and she comes last of the six.

How much of the fairy books came from Mrs. Lang?

The wording changes with The Violet Fairy Book of 1901, whose preface names five tales by Miss Blackley and one by Mr. W. A. Craigie and then adds, “Mrs. Lang did the rest.” Every later preface gives her the rest, the bulk or most of the book, and names the exceptions in some form.

Three of these prefaces name every exception by title, so the remainder can be counted against the book’s own table of contents. The Violet leaves her 29 of its 35 tales, the Brown 27 of 32 and the Lilac 27 of 33. In the other three the exceptions are described as groups, such as the tales Major Campbell collected in India or the Rhodesian stories, so no count is given for them here.

The same prefaces say what that work involved. The Orange preface, read here in a reprint of 1937 or later, warns that the stories “are not literal, or word by word translations, but have been altered in many ways to make them suitable for children,” with cruel deeds “softened down as much as possible.”

The Brown preface of 1904 says Mrs. Lang does not give the tales exactly as they were told, “skipping the pieces” that its intended readers would not like. On Lang’s own description, the credit is for retelling, not for word-for-word translation.

Counted this way, “almost wholly” fits the six books from 1901 to 1910 as Lang himself described them. It does not fit his own account of the first book, where she has no credit at all, or of the next five, where she is one translator in a list of three to eight.

Where did the Blue Fairy Book’s tales come from?

The 1889 preface credits whole groups of tales, while the Project Gutenberg text of the book prints a short source note after most of them, such as “Grimm” or “Madame d’Aulnoy.” Set side by side, the two show whom the preface names for each of the 37 tales.

For 20 it names who did the tale, either for the tale itself or for the group its note belongs to: a reteller for 19, and Lang himself, as “the Editor,” for “The Terrible Head.” For the other 17 neither leads to a name; five of those 17 carry no source note at all.

The 37 tales, with source notes and preface credits, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: The Blue Fairy Book, Project Gutenberg 503, and its 1889 preface (Wikisource), retrieved 2026-11-04

Group credits follow the preface’s wording: “The stories from Grimm are translated by Miss May Sellar,” though it also gives “another from the German” to Miss Sylvia Hunt without naming which. “The Goose-Girl” is one of the six noted “Grimm,” the tale behind the Grimms’ 1815 Goose Girl and its Zwehrn teller. “Aladdin” carries the note “Arabian Nights,” and the preface says that “Miss Violet Hunt condensed ‘Aladdin’,” the tale of the Aladdin that Hanna Diyab told Galland in 1709.

The five tales noted “Charles Perrault” have no named reteller, since the preface says only that “the tales of Perrault are printed from the old English version of the eighteenth century.” In this site’s studio terms, that eighteenth-century translator is an uncredited session player, heard on every Perrault tale in the book and named nowhere in it. “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” the tale of the plate at the top of this page, carries no source note in this text at all; Sleeping Beauty, compared across Basile, Perrault and the Grimms traces its earlier tellings.

Does Lang’s credit hide a named teller?

This site uses the borrowed hearth for an editor who presents named tellers with known lives as the voice of a nameless folk tradition. Lang’s case is a different one: an editor’s name on the title page covers the retellers his own prefaces name, which is a question of credit, not a named teller turned into an anonymous folk voice.

The prefaces do speak of anonymous tellers, and the Green preface thanks the Brothers Grimm, “who took them down from the telling of old women.” But they never name a single teller and then fold her into that crowd, so the record of a named teller, which the label requires, is missing.

The same book shows how easily credit could slip, even for the authors of the tales. Its “Beauty and the Beast” carries the note “La Belle et la Bete. Par Madame de Villeneuve.” In the Olive Fairy Book of 1907, Lang wrote of Madame d’Aulnoy, “To her we owe Beauty and the Beast and The Yellow Dwarf.” Both are Lang’s books, and the two notes name different French writers for the same tale.

By Andrew Lang’s account in 1910, he found the stories and Mrs. Lang wrote them out for the page. His preface of 1889, signed with the same name, thanked Miss Minnie Wright, Miss May Sellar and four other women for the first book of the series, and did not name her.