Drury, Anna H. The Blue Ribbons: A Story of the Last Century. Boston: Whittemore, Niles and Hall, 1856.
This is truly a mid-nineteenth-century creation: a fairy tale set in the eighteenth century! Alexis, a young boy growing up in Louis XIV’s France, encounters a beautiful and benevolent female fairy in the forest—who turns out to be Queen Marie Antoinette! Such a plot would have been difficult to imagine just twenty years before when fairy tales (especially those set in Catholic countries) were largely looked upon by American authors as dangerous to the moral development of children.
