Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales

This book is a great read for adults but some editing is needed when telling the tales to kids.

Valerie Paradiz's book, "Clever Maids," is an excellent history of the Grimm Brothers and their lifelong work cultivating folk tales. I wish I had this book in college, because I think it is a first-rate story that deserves to be shared with the masses. Over the years, the Brothers Grimm have had their singular lives wrapped up in fictional renditions that border on fairy tales themselves. In Drew Barrymore's 1998 movie, Ever After, it is the Grimms who visit an aging dowager queen in France, so she can tell them about her grandmother, the original "Cinderella." Then there is the wildly fictional movie of the same name about The Brothers Grimm that creates them into gallant, manly adventurers who stumble upon fairy tales come to life and have to defeat them, etc. With all of the myth surrounding the men, it is pleasant to see a compact, historical accurate biography of the Grimm Brothers and their fairy tale compilations. The author not only unearthed many interesting facts about where the fairy tales the Grimms took down came from, but her smooth writing talents combined with an academic eye allowed us distinctive, unique insights into their lives and their feelings in relation to the world around them. Though the title is slightly misleading - we don't learn about the way these women might have thought and felt like we do the Grimms - the story itself, and the people involved, are riveting. Historians might have known and written the full story about the creation of the Grimms' Fairytales before, but this is the first work that has made that information accessible, readable, and, quite frankly, thrilling to read.

Clever Maids by Valerie Paradiz is an important contribution to Grimm scholarship, and while Ms Paradiz certainly has credentials as a Germanist, she seems more interested in advancing a feminist point of view than truly following the material where it leads her. She deserves credit for using the Grimm correspondance to correctly attribute the female friends of the Grimms as the immediate sources of many of the famous Kinder und Hausmärchen, but this, as she notes in the prologue (p. xv) was already known to German researchers. What she seems to want to imply, but never outright states, is that the women the Grimms collected from may actually have composed some of the stories when prompted by Jacob and Wilhelm to tell stories from their childhood. Instead she gives lip service to the "oral tradition," while seeming to undermine it at every turn. Again and again she draws comparisons with the lives of the Grimms and their female contributors, always with an observation on the oppressed status of women in 19th Century Germany. Consequently, I find her devotion to German literary scholarship just a little questionable. I recall hearing a radio interview with her on the local NPR affiliate, and she consistantly "americanized" the German names of the figures in her book, as if she was afraid she would lose potential readers by appearing too arcane. Another (small) disappointing point of her research is her apparent unfamiliarity with scripture and the influence of scripture on the stories. On page 135, she states, "In the gospels, (St. Anne) is the mother of the Virgin Mary." In fact, the mother of Mary is neither named nor even mentiioned in either Matthew or Luke; the name "Anna" comes from non-canonical sources, and is most likely an imitation of Hannah, the mother of the Old Testament prophet Samuel, whose infancy narrative closely parralels that of Christ and John the Baptist. Furthermore, when discussing the typical Grimm plotline "of older brother(s) versus younger," (p. 107) she strains to make a biographical comparison to Jacob and Wilhelm's younger brother Ferdinand, while totally ignoring the more obvious parallel to Joseph and Jacob in the book of Genesis. Nonetheless, Ms. Paradiz makes many valid points and certainly has performed a valuable service in bringing the real Grimms' lives into popular readership just when an excrable Hollywood movie has appropriated their names for the sake of brainless entertainment.

Scholars have long known the backstory to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's famous collection of fairy tales. Despite the legends, the brothers were not itinerant travelers collecting the tales from the German peasantry. (Unfortunately, this legend is soon to be perpetuated to a larger audience by Terry Gilliam's entirely fictional film, The Brothers Grimm.) In reality, the brothers mostly collected the tales from their sister, Lotte, and through her circle of friends and associates. The brothers then continously edited the tales for several years until we have the versions of Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Puss in Boots, and many other tales that we know today. Most of this backstory, especially that of the women tellers, has been scattered about in strictly academic works in English and mostly German. Valerie Paradiz has synthesized this material into one cohesive and highly readable book. While we have the stories of the women and the changes made to their tales, we also receive a sympathetic view of the two brothers, struggling to support a family hit by several tragedies by doing work they loved and valued. Neither the brothers' contributions nor those of the women collaborators are diminished. While the book has an academic bent, it works best as general nonfiction and is highly recommended for a much larger audience. Paradiz's writing style is warm and approachable, making details interesting instead of trivial. A familiarity with the Grimms' tales is helpful, but not necessary, since she provides enough information about each to support her prose. Consequently, an interesting slice of German and folklore history is made accessible in a deceptively short book. Footnotes and a biliography are offered in the back of the book for further reading and research.