Author:  Valerie Paradiz

ISBN: 0-7382-0917-1

The following review was conributed by:  Kathryn Atwood: Click Here To View More Of Kathryn's Reviews

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were prolific German scholars, yet the work they
are best known for, the one that will eternally bear their name was not
actually authored by them.  The genesis of the Grimm's "Children's and
Household Fairy Tales," is the fascinating subject of Valerie Paradiz's new
book, Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales.

The brothers Grimm could have gleaned the bulk of the tales from the dusty
old books they were wont to frequent, but, spurred by German nationalism in
an era of Napoleonic domination, they were searching for something simpler,
richer, something more quintessentially German.  They believed that a
"Volk" spirit (i.e., the spirit of the commoner) could more accurately be
found in the hearts and souls of young German women, who had heard the
tales from their mothers and nannies.   Although there were some male
contributors, the focus of Paradiz's skillful narration traces the
assemblage of "Children's and Household Fairy Tales" to at least twenty
core female collaborators who provided the Grimms with over half of their
stories, including some of the collection's  most memorable: "Sleeping
Beauty," "Little Red Riding Cap," and "The Goose Maid."

The real genius of Paradiz's book is her ability to interweave the fairy
tales with the biography.  For instance, the"The Singing Bone," a grisly
tale of fratricide, was communicated to Wilhelm Grimm by his future wife,.
Dortchen Wild (one of the book's main collaborators), while she and Wilhelm
were embroiled in what appears to have been a lover's triangle with
Ferdinand Grimm.  The chapter entitled "The Six Swans" juxtaposes a tale of
sisterly self-sacrifice with Lotte Grimm's unwillingness to be a domestic
slave to her four brothers.

Paradiz is a something of a social historian as well as a German scholar
(she includes many quotes directly from original source material), and her
feminist slant is well taken.  In addition to portraying the domestic woes
of Lotte Grimm and the lack of credited authorship for most of the
collection's female collaborators, she also successfully illustrates how
the tales themselves portray the social inequity of those that told them.
 It was as if, in telling these stories to the Grimm brothers, the young
women were "giving a voice to their voicelessness."

Clever Maids is a scholarly but immensely readable work,  and will
captivate anyone interested in  folk history, German scholarship, or wom 
en's studies.