She adores her “deliciously cruel” stepsisters, especially the older one “who despised me so much it thrilled me”. In Claude Cahun’s story Cinderella, the Humble and Haughty Child, written around 1925 and not previously translated into English, the heroine binds her feet in cloth to keep them “small and compact, and sort of stunted”, because “this exquisite and most effective torture fills me with utter satisfaction”. Each story comes with a twist, from a wolf who is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling the girl’s grandmother and is then arrested for being an anarchist (“I did 20 years of hard labour, while the slut inherited her grandmother’s savings”) to a Cinderella keen to be humiliated.
Many of them reimagine Charles Perrault’s classic 17th-century fairytales.
The 36 stories are by Charles Baudelaire, Anatole France Guillaume Apollinaire and other writers associated with the French decadent literary movement.
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