Guest blog from Marilyn Pemberton, introduced by Joanna
Our guest this week is Marilyn Pemberton, who is passionate (and fascinating) on the subject of fairy tales. Her writing career began with the biography of the Victorian fairy-tale writer, Mary de Morgan, Out of the Shadows. She then moved into fiction where her first book was a fictionalised version of Mary de Morgan’s life, The Jewel Garden.
Later she wrote a series of stories in which fairy tales play a huge part. It starts with A Teller of Tales (set in 1820s). Then comes A Keeper of Tales (1880s), followed by A Seeker of Tales (1900s) and A Bearer of Tales (1910s). The final book of the series, A Maker of Tales, is scheduled for publication in 2026.
Marilyn has also written poetry and two books that have nothing to do with fairy tales. Sold for a Song is a tale of two castrati set in eighteenth-century Italy, and Under the Eye is a 1930s adventure set in Egypt. So you can see that Marilyn’s writing ranges widely. And it’s quite a change for someone who used to be an IT project manager 😉
For today’s blog, she is going to return to her first love, fairy tales. Over to Marilyn:
Telling and retelling of fairy tales
Stories have been told since time immemorial. They have been categorised as myths that honour immortal protagonists and cosmological events, legends that relate to extraordinary protagonists and extraordinary events, folk tales that tell of ordinary, often simple folk…
And fairy tales.
