A few years ago, on Father’s Day, my daughters indulged me and let me show them Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. The girls were unimpressed. And then Belle’s father entered the Beast’s castle, and we watched special effects of people putting their hands through walls and film being played backwards, and I heard my daughters gasp at the magic on the screen. It was the thing itself, a story they knew well, retold with assurance and brilliance.

Sometimes the fairy-tale tradition intersects with the literary tradition. In 1924, the Irish writer and playwright Lord Dunsany wrote The King of Elfland’s Daughter, in which the elders of the English kingdom of Eld decide they wish to be ruled by a magic lord, and in which a princess is stolen from Elfland and brought to England. In 1926, Hope Mirrlees, a member of the Bloomsbury set and a friend of T. S. Eliot, published Lud-in-the-Mist, a quintessentially English novel of transcendent oddness, set in a town on the borders of Fairyland, where illegal traffic in fairy fruit (like the fruit sold in Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market”), and the magic and poetry and wildness that come with the fruit from over the border, change the lives of the townsfolk forever.

Mirrlees’s unique vision was influenced by English folktales and legends (Mirrlees was the partner of classicist Jane Ellen Harrison), by Christina Rossetti and by a Victorian homicidal lunatic, the painter Richard Dadd, in particular his unfinished masterwork, an obsessively detailed painting called The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke—also the subject of a radio play by Angela Carter.

With her astonishing collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber, Carter was the first writer I encountered who took fairy tales seriously, in the sense of not trying to explain them or to make them less or to pin them dead on paper, but to reinvigorate them. Her lycanthropic and menstrual Red Riding Hood variants were gathered together in Neil Jordan’s coming-of-age fantasy film The Company of Wolves. She brought the same intensity to her retelling of other fairy tales, from “Bluebeard” (a Carter favorite) to “Puss in Boots,” and then created her own perfect fairy tale in the story of Fevvers, the winged acrobat in Nights at the Circus.

When I was growing up, I wanted to read something that was unapologetically a fairy tale, and just as unapologetically for adults. I remember the delight with which, as a teenager, I stumbled across William Goldman’s The Princess Bride in a North London library. It was a fairy tale with a framing story which claimed that Goldman was editing Silas Morgenstern’s classic (albeit fictional) book into the form in which it was once read to him by his father, who left out the dull bits—a conceit that justified telling adults a fairy tale, and which legitimized the book by making it a retelling, as all fairy stories somehow have to be. I interviewed Goldman in the early 1980s, and he described it as his favorite of his books and the least known, a position it kept until the 1987 film of the book made it a perennial favorite.