About the Author

Barbara Fass Leavy is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of English in Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College. She is the author of To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme and, with Per Schelde Jacobsen, of Ibsen's Forsaken Merman: Folklore in the Late Plays.

Reviews

"In her compendious study, [of the folktale of the runaway wife] Leavy argues that the contradictory claims of nature and culture are embodied in the legendary figure of the swan maiden, a woman torn between the human and bestial worlds." --The New York Times Book Review