Diary: Kathryn Davis on Who Wrote the Fairy Tales (Part One)

Nordic Paper Industry’s English-language edition of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen

“There was once a little boy who had taken cold by going out and getting his feet wet,” the tale begins. “No one could think how he had managed to do so, for the weather was quite dry … ” You didn’t have to be a genius to see that this was the way I’d come down with pleurisy at my best friend Peggy’s seventh birthday party, or to realize that the black gumdrop and toothpick poodle I’d been making was to blame. So it happened that I got to spend the whole next month in bed, my mother beside me, reading me one fairy tale after another. Every now and then she’d steal a glance in my direction to make sure I hadn’t stopped breathing.