I do not know that I would be a writer today were it not for fairy tales. I was fortunate to have parents who had a well-stocked library and who believed in reading to their daughters; it was on their knees, as a very young child, that I discovered the Arabian Nights and the folk tales put into print by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson – and into my head burst genies and dragons and princesses and knights and castles and cottages… and loss and darkness and love and light.

It was not only books, however, that awakened in me a fascination with fairy tales. My governess, Zula, harnessed the age-old tradition of oral storytelling (which of course predated the formalisation of fairy tales in print). She could weave a tale from her own imagination that rendered me completely spellbound; her words painted the most captivating scenes in my mind. Over the many years that Zula told me stories, she taught me how to be inspired by an age-old tale and turn it into something new and exciting; in essence, she taught me how to be a writer.

In 2004, writer Christopher Booker published a book on storytelling entitled The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. In this seminal work, he introduces seven core stories that are at the foundation of all stories, from ‘ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today’. Fairy tales feature prominently: Cinderella, for example, is the core rags to riches story; Beauty and the Beast is a rebirth story; Goldilocks is a tale of voyage and return.

A fairy tale, then, is not a literary form to dismiss as childish or fantastical. It is the foundation for any modern fictional writing. Certainly, readers of my own romance fiction will feel the resonance of the stories of my childhood, and that is where they will find their security, their comfort with the story. They can hold fast to what they know as I take diversions from the old and familiar, to I tell my own story.

I was inspired to think about the appeal of fairy tales this week by a recent news item on the subject. Have you heard that a new Mark Twain fairy tale is to be published in September, on the 150th anniversary of his first book’s publication? The story, entitled ‘The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine’, is described thus in the publisher’s synopsis:

In a hotel in Paris one evening in 1879, Mark Twain sat with his young daughters, who begged their father for a story. After the girls chose a picture from a magazine to get started, Twain began telling them the tale of Johnny, a poor boy in possession of some magical seeds. Later, Twain would jot down some rough notes about the story, but the tale was left unfinished . . . until now.

Plucked from the Mark Twain archive at the University of California at Berkeley, Twain’s notes now form the foundation of a fairy tale picked up over a century later. With only Twain’s fragmentary script and a story that stops partway as his guide, author Philip Stead has written a tale that imagines what might have been if Twain had fully realized this work:

Johnny, forlorn and alone except for his pet chicken, meets a kind woman who gives him seeds that change his fortune, allowing him to speak with animals and sending him on a quest to rescue a stolen prince. In the face of a bullying tyrant king, Johnny and his animal friends come to understand that generosity, empathy, and quiet courage are gifts more precious in this world than power and gold.

Illuminated by Erin Stead’s graceful, humorous, and achingly poignant artwork, this is a story that reaches through time and brings us a new book from America’s most legendary writer, envisioned by two of today’s most important names in children’s literature.

This publication of a newly discovered manuscript by a respected writer of old is following a trend in publishing (I wrote about this last year). It’s fascinating that there is such excitement over a new fairy tale – and not only because it was written by the author of ‘The Great American Novel’.

I think the interest in this new story comes down to a recognition that fairy tales are not ‘just for children’; they are for life. They are the foundations of stories, because the archetypes within them are timeless. More than that, though, they are a source of comfort, solace and strength. A fairy tale transports you back to childhood, when dragons were real and, most importantly, could be defeated.

As Albert Einstein said: ‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.’