Reading Angela Carter's translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault is a bit like following a trail of bread crumbs. The translation cuts a direct path to the production of The Bloody Chamber, published a year later, and Carter's grudging acceptance into the contemporary canon. Having authored a mix of sixties bohemian stories and science fiction fantasies, Carter found her niche with Chamber, reinterpreting classic fairy tales and displaying for the first time her singular ability, best described by Salman Rushdie, to "[open] an old story for us, like an egg, and [find] the new story, the now-story we want to hear within." What many of her admirers such as Rushdie might not realize is she achieved this transformation by making use of the same material previously encountered in her slim, near-forgotten translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault.

An early mention of this translation appears in a New Society article from 1976, "The Better to Eat You With," where Carter describes "browsing through Perrault's Contes du temps passé on the pretext of improving my French." The rest of the article concerns her own interpretation of what she calls the "Ur-collection" of fairy tales, Perrault's Histoires ou Contes du Temps Pass avec des Moralites, first published in 1697. In Perrault's version of the popular tales, Carter concludes "all the elements that our more barbarous times rejoice in for their own sake as part of the rarest show of the unconscious are subsumed by Perrault into a project for worldly instruction."