Curious, If True

Gaskell off duty: a traveller in France who blunders into a château where the guests are Puss in Boots, Bluebeard and the Sleeping Beauty, grown old; a curse on a Welsh house; a nurse's story with a child at the window in the snow. She was a Manchester minister's wife who wrote about factory poverty, and these strange tales, written for Dickens's magazine, are her other hand entirely.