As a writer of short fiction for adults, Louisa Molesworth is little known, her accomplishments in this genre greatly overshadowed by her fame as a writer for children. Of the 101 books she published, only a handful are for adults: several novels and collections of stories. At the zenith of her success, she received letters from children around the world, including the crown prince of Naples (the future Victor Emmanuel III), who wrote to say that her "Carrots": Just a Little Boy (1876) had enabled him to survive the period of mourning for the death of his grandfather Victor Emmanuel II. The Westminster Budget (20 December 1893) reported that Alexandra, Princess of Wales, had read six of Molesworth's books to her children. Yet today even her children's stories are not well known, perhaps because the didactic tone is not palatable a century later and because her kind of fairy tales has been...