The Lilac Fairy Book

The last of Lang's coloured fairy books: Portuguese, Irish, Spanish and West African tales, among them the queen of the flowery isles, the shifty lad and the story of a very bad boy. Lang wrote in the preface that he had come to the end of what he could find worth telling. The Irish stories in this volume are the closest to the way they were actually told. Seventeen landscape plates, among them woodland scenes by John Atkinson Grimshaw and John Constable, answer the forest and castle settings of these tales.