Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Gustave Doré, John Everett Millais and John Collier. Gaskell off duty: a traveler in France who blunders into a château where the guests are Puss in Boots, Bluebeard and the Sleeping Beauty, grown old; a curse laid by an Irish servant on a Lancashire squire; a nurse's story with a child at the window in the snow. She was a Manchester minister's wife who wrote about factory poverty, and these strange tales, written for Dickens's magazine, are her other hand entirely. Fifty-six plates, from Munch to Orpen, trace the same roads, trees and portraits that haunt these tales, painted between 1780 and 1923.