Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. By Valerie Paradiz. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 222 pp., bibliography, and index. This book about the forgotten and unknown women of the Grimms' fairy tales, the social climate in which they collected their stories, and the extraordinary collaboration that bridged the gender divisions inherent in romantic culture to bring the into (xii). The author uses published correspondence of girls and women in the Grimms' circle to confirm their role in initially supplying tales for the Grimm collection. English-speaking devotees of the Grimm tales who have not read the work of Heinz Rolleke may not be aware of this material. Paradiz discusses marriage as women's only realistic economic option, portraying the powerlessness as a woman (14) of Jacob and Wilhelm's mother, Dorothea, and vividly describing Dortchen Wild (who complained about how boring their religion lessons were) and sister Lotte (who, on the other hand, enjoyed learning all the prayers and songs in church [47]). These statements, neither documented nor footnoted, point toward a fatal flaw: the book's repeated slippage between authorial claim and documentable fact, culminating in Paradiz's assertion that the young ladies of the Wild family used the tales ultimately as an expression of their own sufferings, as 'a place from which to speak about their own speechlessness' (200n6). This claim originates, however, not in the women's own words but in Marina Warner's assessment of the fairy-tale-telling situation in From the Beast to the Blond. At the moment there are, in effect, two histories of fairy tales in circulation. In the study of German fairy tales, one account acknowledges the role of print in the dissemination of fairy tales, is informed by the theoretical framework of Rudolf Schenda and the detailed documentation of Manfred Gratz, and is guided by the thorough explorations available in the Enzyklopadie des Marchens. Unfortunately, this history is almost entirely unknown and unused in English-reading scholarship and unaccountably not referenced by Paradiz. Instead, she positions her study within a second traditional history and thus remains a mere conduit for now-obsolete assertions. She perpetuates the erroneous notion of exclusively oral sources: That's just what the [Grimms'] fairy tales are: that have been transmitted orally, generation to generation, from as far back as antiquity and the Middle Ages (x). Charles Perrault's stories were not original creations, but collected oral material edited and fashioned by him into (96). Paradiz says that she intended her book to bring scholarly perceptions of the last forty years to a broad lay audience. But from what scholar could she get the notion that [t]he story of The Three Army Surgeons' strangely reflected the rising incidence of organ transplants that had begun to take place in experimental medicine in Europe (176)? The latter embodies Paradiz's understanding of Jacob's concerns about his body's fate should he die in Paris without previously having made burial arrangements (206n13). Not pioneering surgeons but routine body snatchers providing medical schools with cadavers for anatomy lessons would have been the source of his concerns (a correction confirmed by an organ transplant surgeon). An outlandish proposition like early-eighteenth-century experimental organ transplants undermines other doubtful statements. …