Mary De Morgan

De Morgan, Mary (1850–1907), British writer of fairy tales. The youngest child of a professor of mathematics at London University and sister of William De Morgan, artist and author, after the death of her father in 1871 she went to live with her brother in the Chelsea house where he designed pottery and ornamental tiles. Here she met Pre‐Raphaelite writers and artists such as William Morris and Edward Burne‐Jones (to whose children she told her first stories). Her first book of fairy tales, On a Pincushion, illustrated by her brother, was published in 1877. The opening preamble, ‘On a Pincushion’, is in the style of Hans Christian Andersen, and his influence can be detected in ‘The Story of Vain Lamorna’, where pride and vanity are humbled. But the magical stealing of Lamorna's reflection is a theme used by E. T. A. Hoffmann in his ‘Das Abenteuer der Silvester‐Nacht’ (‘A New Year's Eve Adventure’), and De Morgan's stories certainly suggest that she had read Hoffmann as well as Andersen. In ‘Siegfrid and Handa’ the Owl who flies away ‘hooting in triumph’ with one of Siegfrid's eyes reminds us of Hoffmann's Sandman in the story of that name who tears out children's eyes, and a version of the automaton Olimpia from the same tale appears in De Morgan's ‘A Toy Princess’. This describes how a fairy godmother substitutes a lifelike doll for the real princess in a country where the people were ‘so very polite that they hardly ever spoke to each other’. The unvarying perfection of the toy princess's manners and the civil responses which are the only words she can utter captivate the king and his courtiers, and rejecting the flesh and blood princess they choose to keep the automaton.

De Morgan's second collection of tales, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde (1880), illustrated by Walter Crane, contains her best and most deeply felt writing. The title story is sinister and powerful. Fiorimonde is bewitchingly beautiful but a sorceress. She turns each prince who comes to court her into a bead which she wears on a golden string round her neck, until she is finally destroyed by her own jealous vanity. ‘The Wanderings of Arasmon’ is a poignant account of a girl turned by an evil spell into a golden harp, and carried unknowingly by the young Arasmon with him as he spends the rest of his life searching for her. The heroine of ‘The Wise Princess’ finds only in death the happiness she has sought.

The Windfairies (1900) was dedicated to the children of Margaret Burne‐Jones who had heard the first stories. There is less enchantment and more homeliness and moral purpose in these, but ‘Dumb Othmar’ with Hulda's hallucinatory quest, accompanied by a glittering green snake, for her lover's lost voice has echoes of the supernatural world of Hoffmann's ‘The Golden Pot’.

— Gillian Avery