This study looks beyond the Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, to the tellers of the tales, and to the social and cultural contexts in which the tales are told and re-told through the centuries, from the ancient sibyls to the 18th-century salonieres, and from Disney to Angela Carter. The value and enduring popularity of folk and fairy tales derives not only from their mythic significance but, crucially, from the fact that their concerns are rooted in the material world. Warner looks at favourite tales, from Beauty and the Beast to Bluebeard, and a rich vein of other tales, in a historical perspective, showing how often the tellers were women - nurses, grandmothers, midwives, the 18th-century women who had no alternative literary voice - who produced tales to deal with actual, urgent dilemmas in the lives of their listeners: men, matrimony, sex and morality.