There is a theory, that I rather subscribe to. The frame story implies that if he doesn't change, she will kill him. It's all very complex and subtle. The story is about a woman who persuades a man in power to a different temper and attitude, and so it is about women's wiles, what women will get up to. She has a plan, she has a scheme.

I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism.

An interesting example is that the worst woman in the book, who is so cruel and violent, is the sorceress in "The Prince of the Black Islands." She's a beautiful young woman, and she has turned her husband into stone from the waist down. A traveling sultan finds him, in his dreadful state, and the man petrified from the waist down tells his sad story...how his wife comes every afternoon and beats him until the blood runs down. She's just unwontedly, arbitrarily cruel.

I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.

Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it...that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well... English has fallen short.