Miracles of Love: French Fairy Tales by Women is the first time the Modern Language Association (MLA) series Texts and Translations has published a collection of fairy tales by the conteuses of the 1690s. The series aims to make world-language texts available in English (as well as in the source language) for undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Miracles of Love presents a select group of tales by the conteuses, focusing on Catherine Bernard, Catherine Durand, Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force, Marie-Jeanne L'héritier de Villandon, and Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat. As the title indicates, this anthology focuses on questions related to love and how tales by the conteuses challenge contemporary Disneyfied conceptions filled with good fairies, innocent romance, and happy endings.In her introduction, Nora Martin Peterson nicely presents in accessible language the historical background of the 1690s fashion of fairy tales as well as the current scholarship. Citing the work of Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, Peterson re-emphasizes the impact of Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile's Italian fairy tales on the 1690s French conteuses and ties the circulation of tales within Europe to the rise in print technology. She also cites the recent archival work of Volker Schröder, whose blog Anecdota questions some of our previous notions about the conteuses and includes the most accurate and current information on Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Peterson situates the fairy tales with respect to the Querelle des femmes and, drawing from Allison Stedman, dialogues “between salon women” (p. xvii). The introduction suggests different avenues readers may take when approaching the tales, paying particular attention to how they problematize love, marriage, gender, and desire.Each section begins with a succinct biography of the author that provides social context, followed by the tales. The collection opens with Bernard's version of “Tufty Riquet” (sometimes translated as “Riquet with the Tuft”), which significantly contrasts with Charles Perrault's version. Whereas, in Perrault, the stupid heroine marries an ugly dwarf to become intelligent and live happily ever after (the dwarf transforms into a handsome prince), Bernard puts a nightmarish twist on the tale: the heroine gains intelligence and betrays her dwarf husband by taking a lover, who eventually transforms to perfectly resemble the ugly dwarf. The tale concludes: “But perhaps this was no great loss: lovers always become husbands in the end” (p. 17). By opening the collection with such a tale, Peterson immediately challenges common notions of how fairy tales should conclude.Many of the tales include different forms of real or perceived betrayals. In Durand's “A Miracle of Love,” it is the hero who lacks intelligence, and a beautiful fairy hopes to transform him through her love. However, his dullness dissipates due to loving a shepherdess (a princess in disguise), and he lies to conceal his relationship with Brillante. In La Force's “Green and Blue,” which Peterson qualifies as a “riddle tale” (p. 60), a prince abducts the heroine out of jealousy. The two tales by L'héritier present first, a particularly enterprising heroine able to kill—all the while remaining virtuous—in order to protect herself; and secondly, a story rooted in Indigenous French culture, emphasizing its connection to the troubadours of Provence and integrating the hero into a genealogy that includes Mélusine. The last two tales, by Murat, bring us again to unhappy endings. In “The Pleasant Punishment,” the last lines suggest that love does not last long after the wedding, thus undermining the apparently harmonious conclusion. “Anguillette” is particularly disturbing in its challenge to romance: Princess Hebe—who has succeeded in all the trials presented by the fairy Anguillette—falls in love with Prince Atimir, who betrays her love and marries her sister. Although Hebe subsequently meets another appropriate suitor, she betrays her partner, which leads to Atimir's and Hebe's death. Miracles of Love thus opens and closes with tales that end tragically, demonstrating that fairy tales were not always about happy endings.In the “Translator's Note,” Jordan Stump explains that he tries to maintain a balance between the text's “foreignness” and its “domestication” (p. xxxii), and I believe he succeeds in doing so. Rather than translate the characters’ names, which bear meaning in French, but which also can sound like proper names, Stump retains the French and includes a gloss for the reader to understand their meaning. This grounds the text in a French context, thus retaining the text's “foreignness.” The translation is straightforward but not so literal as to sound clunky. And there are nice moments where the English evokes the spirit and the imagery of the French. For instance, “Tufty Riquet” includes this description: “Mama . . . n'avait pas assez d'esprit pour savoir qu'elle n'en avait point,” which could be translated as “Mama . . . did not have enough wit to know that she had none at all.” Stump cleverly renders this as “Mama . . . was not bright enough to see just how dim she was” (p. 7). Another nice example is in “A Miracle of Love”: the fairy is “piquée de quelque jalousie,” which is translated as “jealousy was needling her cruelly” (p. 38). This could be translated as “overcome with jealousy,” but Stump's use of “needling” maintains the imagery that “prick” (piquée) evokes.As someone who has worked in this area for decades, I feel that scholars must keep reiterating that Disney does not simply “reflect” fairy-tale history, but indeed constructs it—often in ways that are inaccurate, that stifle female voices and agency, and that simplify the functions and limits of the genre. Targeting undergraduate and graduate students, Miracles of Love has the potential to impact perceptions of the genre. It is also a useful tool for fairy-tale students and scholars of later periods who want accurate background on the genre's history. This is a well-honed translation with supporting paratexts that neither undergraduates nor general readers should find overwhelming, and that provide frameworks to better understand the context and stakes of the texts. Miracles of Love is a welcome addition to anthologies of works by the conteuses and a welcome addition to MLA's Texts and Translations series, where it may foster new insights about and challenges to our contemporary notions of what a fairy tale is, what a fairy tale does, and how gender can play out in a fairy tale.