Donoghue, Emma (1969– ), Irish novelist, playwright, and scholar. Donoghue's Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) is a series of linked retellings of twelve well‐known fairy tales. One character in each tale becomes the narrator of the next; for example, the fairy godmother in ‘The Tale of a Shoe’ (a ‘Cinderella’ variant) tells the next tale, ‘The Tale of a Bird’ (a ‘Bluebeard’ variant) as her own. Donoghue disrupts the usual patterns of heterosexual desire; in these tales princesses often ignore princes to fall in love with fairy godmothers, stepmothers, and even with witches—older, powerful women usually portrayed as threatening or evil in the fairy‐tale canon. The thirteenth story, ‘The Tale of the Kiss’, told by a cave‐dwelling witch, is not a variant of any traditional tale; it is deliberately inconclusive, enlisting the reader in the task of narration: ‘This is the story you asked for. I leave it in your mouth.’
Donoghue's tales are also linguistically inventive, particularly in ‘The Tale of the Cottage’ (a ‘Hansel and Gretel’ variant), where a limited Gretel tells her new version of the story in blunt, uninflected prose: ‘I once had brother that mother say we were pair of hands one fast one slow.’ In all the tales her prose is simple and sure: ‘Bowls spun like snow, goblets shattered like hail.’ She continues the work of writers like Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, and Angela Carter, giving new life to old stories, recasting them to question old paradigms.
— Elizabeth Wanning Harries
