AustLit

'In her contribution to Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman’s collection, Rebellious Daughters: True Stories from Australia’s Finest Female Writers (2016), Krissy Kneen cites fairy-tale scholar Marina Warner, who notes that the original term for the fairy tale was Wundermärchen, the wonder tale. ‘To wonder’, writes Warner, ‘communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire’ (40). In the same way, Kneen observes, the (often horrific) fairy tales told to her by her grandmother, stories which did not at all adhere to the philosophy of characters who lived ‘happily ever after’, filled the young girl ‘with a powerful and dangerous curiosity’ (40). It is that desire to know, that epistemophilia, which not only drives the women and girls of the stories collected here, but those about whom they read, and whom we now, in this collection, voraciously follow, hungry for knowledge, for endings happy or otherwise.' (Introduction)