Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon was a relative of the better-known Charles Perrault, and among the most important creators of the fairy tales genre. This ground-breaking collection gathers four stories translated here for the first time and originally published a year before Perrault's better known Tales of Mother Goose, plus an essay in which Mlle L'Héritier casts more light on the detail of her thinking, the process by which the tales came to be written and the various things that she was attempting to achieve. These stories are the source material that inspired Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and are not an adaptation of folklore, but an attempt to recycle literary inventions attributed to the medieval troubadours.