Frances Browne, although she was known in her time as the Blind Poetess of Ulster, is more famous in the twentieth century as a children's writer. Browne, an industrious poet and journalist whose nineteenth-century poetic reputation was largely bound up with the romance of her struggle with blindness, produced two moderately admired volumes of poems in the 1840s and a third volume of children's verse in 1856. She might be unknown today if several stories from her volume of fairy tales for children, Granny's Wonderful Chair, and Its Tales of Fairy Times (1856), had not made an impression on the much more famous children's writer Frances Hodgson Burnett. Burnett, who in the 1870s unwittingly retold several of Browne's stories from hazy childhood memory, was charged with plagiarism and afterwards republished Browne's tales with an explanatory preface. Since 1880 Browne's versions of these stories have been frequently reprinted, often in anthologies of...