The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories with Foreword by Dr. Marilyn Pemberton

By Mary de Morgan

Rediscover a Victorian-era collection of fairy tales.

Employing sorcery, a wicked princess wears the princes and kings who desire to marry her as crystal beads strung on a gold chain around her neck.

A musician searches the world for his missing wife, unaware that elves have transformed her into the golden harp he plays every day.

A determined prince embarks on a quest to find the evil fairy who stole the heart of his beloved princess.

These are just a few of the inventive and captivating stories in this fine new edition of Mary De Morgan's fairy tales, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories (1880).

Despite her fairy tales being well-known and loved during her time, De Morgan has been overlooked by history and largely forgotten. Considered one of the earliest feminist writers, her influential fairy tales often reflected her social and political ideologies, including reform for women. Featuring strong heroines and subverted gender roles, her untraditional stories often eschewed wealth and power, and occasionally ended sadly with no happily-ever-after.

Also included in this new edition is the story "Through the Fire" from On a Pincushion (1877), De Morgan's first published book of fairy tales. Immerse yourself in a young boy's adventure as he journeys to the North Pole on a mission for the fire Princess.

Fans of Hans Christian Anderson and George MacDonald will adore De Morgan's rediscovered collection of fairy tales.

Foreword by Dr. Marilyn Pemberton, Out of the Shadows: The Life and Works of Mary De Morgan (2012).

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordFire Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680576634

Book preview

The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

and Other Stories

Mary De Morgan

Edited by

Audrey Hackett

Foreword by

Dr. Marilyn Pemberton

WordFire Press

The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories by Mary De Morgan

Originally published in 1880. This work is in the public domain.

This new edition edited by Audrey Hackett

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Dr. Marilyn Pemberton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold, or given away. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68057-663-4

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-664-1

Jacketed Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-665-8

Illustrations and figures are in the public domain.

Cover design by Audrey Hackett and Allyson Longueira

Cover art by Blue Ring Media | DepositPhotos

Interior art by Ivan Burchak | DepositPhotos

Published by WordFire Press, LLC

P.O. Box 1840

Monument, CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press Edition 2024

Printed in the USA

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To:

My six little nephews and nieces

These stories are affectionately dedicated

by

their loving aunt

Mary De Morgan

Contents

Foreword

The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

The Wanderings of Arasmon

The Heart of Princess Joan

The Pedlar’s Pack

The Bread of Discontent

Ye Three Clever Kings

The Wise Princess

Through the Fire

Publisher’s Note

About the Author

About the Editor

WordFire Classics

Foreword

Mary De Morgan was the youngest of seven children, born in 1850 into a family of intellectuals, non-conformists, and dissenters. Her father, Augustus, was a brilliant mathematician and her mother, Sophia Elizabeth, supported social reform and was a campaigner against vivisection and slavery. The mother was also an ardent spiritualist and was convinced that Mary was a seer. De Morgan’s eldest brother, William, eleven years older, designed and produced tiles that are still very collectible today but he made no money from his endeavours. He eventually became financially successful when he turned to writing novels in his late sixties. Another brother, George, co-founded the London Mathematical Society and would have been a mathematical genius had he not died at an early age of tuberculosis—brother William called it the De Morgan curse.

De Morgan wrote short stories and serious articles on social and political themes but is best known today, if she is known at all, as a writer of fairy tales. De Morgan was a regular visitor at the household of William Morris, the designer and socialist, and she often told her fairy stories to the Morris and Burne-Jones children and to the young Rudyard Kipling.

Whatever the reason, whether from choice or otherwise, De Morgan, like many other women at that time, remained unmarried, and because there were no male members of the family with sufficient funds to support her, she had to earn her own keep. De Morgan followed in her mother’s footsteps and did her social duty by visiting the poor families in the East End and running a mothers’ club, but she was also a member of the Women’s Franchise League, and she signed the Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage in 1889.

She was an independent woman, who had very strong views on the society in which she lived and the place of the woman within it. She chose to make her voice heard and her opinions known through the genre of the fairy tale because after all, many of the things that were concerning people at the time, such as the institution of marriage, the role of women in society and the effects of materialism on the individual and on society as a whole, are actually inherent components of a fairy tale. Fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, and Hans Christian Andersen, for instance, were often used to maintain the patriarchal status quo and to endorse the values and social codes of the time, including the premise that wealth and/or marriage equates to happiness and that the woman’s role is to be patient and wait for the active man to save her. De Morgan published three volumes of fairy tales, On a Pincushion and Other Fairy Tales in 1877, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories in 1880, and The Wind Fairies and Other Tales in 1900. In all these anthologies, De Morgan challenges the prevalent ideologies by subverting the traditional fairy-tale conventions and therefore also societal ones.

All the contemporary reviews of The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories consider the stories to be for children only and do not concede that De Morgan also challenged contemporary core attitudes by hiding her ideologies in the drapes of fantasy.

The following extract, from The London Figaro, dated December 8, 1880, is a typical review:

To write a good fairy-tale requires a very varied combination of qualities. Delicacy, naïveté, and originality of fancy, simplicity of style and freshness of humour, are among the most prominent of the essential gifts, and withal there needs a quality of sympathy which is very difficult to define. That Miss De Morgan possessed all these qualities her former little work had sufficiently proved, and the present tasteful volume still further exemplifies them. Though the tales are all such as children delight in, even grown-up people, if they retain the least spark of the childlike in their nature, may be attracted by the freshness, the simplicity, and the pathos of the little stories. Miss De Morgan is a genuinely original writer. Beyond the fact that she uses similar supernatural machinery, she does not in any sense imitate former writers of fairy-tales. The Necklace of Fiorimonde and The Heart of Princess Joan are charming and ingenious stories, and The Wanderings of Arasmon has a touch of simple and genuine pathos. The same may be said of The Wise Princess, which is a little prose poem conveying a moral without the smallest obtrusiveness. In The Pedlar and his Pack and The Bread of Discontent, the authoress’ graceful humour is seen at its best. The former especially is quite worthy of Hans Andersen. It is one of the beauties of Miss De Morgan’s work that while she never writes a story with a purpose, all her tales have some of the ethical symbolism which is inseparable from a true and worthy representation of life and nature, such as even the most fanciful fairy-tale should be.

The first fairy tale in the anthology gives the book its title: The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde. De Morgan starts this story by immediately over-turning one of the fundamental fairy-tale―and indeed societal―conventions: that beauty correlates to goodness. Princess Fiorimonde retains her beautiful looks by means of witchcraft and has no desire to wed a man who would prevent her from practising it. A witch gives her an enchanted gold chain, which, when touched, will turn the person into a crystal bead to hang upon the chain. Princess Fiorimonde claps her hands with joy, for she will have great princes and kings to adorn her and all their greatness shall not help them. For a male to become an adornment for a female indeed subverts traditional Victorian gender roles.

Princess Fiorimonde, of course, eventually gets her comeuppance and she herself becomes a bead. Although a child reader will certainly relish the story for its macabre quality and eventual demise of the evil Princess, an adult will recognise De Morgan’s critique on the prevalent idealisation of the female form and the erroneous correlation of beauty with goodness. By De Morgan’s subversive reversal of the practice of taking a wife as personal adornment, De Morgan signals her contempt of marriages based on anything other than true and equal affection, and the acquisition of wives, who are expected to be perfect in every way, rather than as flawed human beings.

The next fairy tale, The Wanderings of Arasmon, continues with the theme of marriage and De Morgan anticipates by almost a decade many of the New Woman writings that abounded in the 1890s. This tale is sorrowful and heart-rending, certainly not one with a happy ever after ending. Arasmon and Chrysea, wandering musicians, have a perfect marriage, the result of mutual love and respect, a common interest, joint activity and equal contribution and payment. The pair come across a village cursed for its avarice. Unbeknownst to her husband, Chrysea manages to break the curse by repeating faultlessly an elfin tune, but as a result she is turned into a golden harp. Arasmon carries the harp with him for the rest of his life whilst he travels the world desperately searching for his missing wife, not realising that she is actually there with him, silenced and powerless. The spell is eventually broken when Arasmon is on his deathbed and Chrysea dies of a broken heart.

The third tale in the collection is The Heart of Princess Joan. It has a fairly conventional plot structure, in that a new-born child is cursed by a disgruntled fairy so that she loses her heart; she never cries, and she never shows love to anyone, not even her parents. Despite this fault Prince Michael falls in love with her but will not marry her until he has recovered her heart. He asks her to wait for seven years―the obligatory time period in any decent fairy tale―and then goes off on his quest. This is a traditional tale with the expected ending but there is one part of the story that suggests that De Morgan, like her mother, had an abhorrence of vivisection. Before Prince Michael can enter the castle where Princess Joan’s heart is hidden, he must build a wall for the old man that guards it. He must work until some serpent eggs hatch, which they do after almost seven years.

But out of the eggs, there came no one fully formed animal, but from one egg came a foot, from another a leg, from another a tail, and from one a head, and each looked as though it belonged to some different beast, yet all these drew themselves together, and joined so well that the join was not to be seen. And they made a hideous monster of many colours.

The next story, The Pedlar’s Pack, is as relevant today as it was in 1880 and illustrates the dangers to society of living on credit. The structure is of the well-recognised animal fable, one much loved by children for its repetition. It illustrates the dangers of offering money that is not actually available for something that is not actually needed and the violence and ill-feeling that can ensue because of greed and the exploitation of others.

One of the concerns that De Morgan shared with the socialist William Morris was the devastating effect of mass-production, on both the individual and society as a whole. This concern is addressed in The Bread of Discontent. In this fairy tale De Morgan does not attack the consumer of the mass-produced goods, but rather the producer, who has given in to the temptation of having identical, flawless goods produced by means other than his own hands. The enchanted bread results in the consumer becoming more and more despondent and angry at life. Eventually the townsfolk turn on the baker, flogging him almost to death and destroying his bakery. Only when the baker returns to making the imperfect bread by hand is order restored and everyone recovers their former good humour and the collapse of society is averted.

The penultimate story is The Three Clever Kings, in which De Morgan shows that contentment of the simple life is preferable to a life of unbefitting power. It’s a simple tale in which De Morgan advises her readers to do what they are good at rather than strive for something they are not suited for.

The last fairy tale in this second volume, The Wise Princess, reflects on the theme of happiness and questions what it really means. Princess Fernanda is greedy, not for wealth or power, but for knowledge. She wants to know everything, believing it will bring her happiness. After three years of study she does indeed know everything and is the wisest in the land, but still does not know how to be happy. She can find no one who can tell her. One day she sees a child struggling in the waves and plunges into the water to save him, but in so doing loses her own life. When the servants find her they are amazed that she is smiling. Happiness, then, has nothing to do with knowledge and cannot be taught, but is achieved by thinking of others, being selfless, and ultimately being willing to give one’s own life for the sake of another. Not a particularly happy tale, but one which perhaps cheers a young reader who has a dislike of learning.

By the turn of the nineteenth century Mary was a relatively well-known and respected published writer, albeit not a very well paid one, who lived very much in the world of artists and intellectuals. She does not seem to have written anything after 1900 and at the beginning of the new century she went to live in Egypt, for health reasons, where she became a directress of a girls’ reformatory in Helouan. She died of tuberculosis—the De Morgan curse again—in 1907 at the age of fifty-seven and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Cairo.

Dr. Marilyn Pemberton

Out of the