GRIMM, Wilhelm (1786-1859). Autograph manuscript of a tale, "Liebe Mili" (‘Dear Mili‘), n.p., n.d. [1816].

In German. 134 lines, densely written on 3½ pages, 243 x 206mm, bifolium, a clean copy with a few minor autograph emendations, early annotation at upper margin of p.1 "Wilhelm Grimm 1816" (separating a little along center crease, with two tiny areas of loss measuring no more than 2mm, not affecting any words; a few minor spots of soiling). Custom folder and box. Provenance: reportedly by descent from the recipient; sold at J.A. Stargardt, Marburg, 12 June 1974, lot 638a (DM 12,000) – bought by Bernard H. Breslauer – acquired by the publishers Farrar, Straus & Giroux from Justin Schiller, 1983, and subsequently presented to Maurice Sendak.

A complete tale by Wilhelm Grimm, apparently lost until its rediscovery at auction in 1974. Grimm’s tale begins with a 23-line introductory paragraph in the form of a letter to "Dear Mili," imagining her throwing a flower into a brook: the flower becomes an analogy of the meeting of minds, and Grimm goes on "Thus does my heart go out to you, and though my eyes have not seen you yet, it loves you and thinks it is sitting beside you. And you say: 'Tell me a story.' And it replies: 'Yes, dear Mili, just listen.'" The tale itself then opens in the traditional style, "Once upon a time there was a widow who lived at the very end of a village…" and relates the story (as summarised by Edwin McDowell, "A Fairy Tale by Grimm Comes to Light," New York Times, 28 September 1983) of "a mother who sends her daughter into the woods to save her from impending war. The unnamed child … is led by her guardian angel to the hut of an old man who gives her shelter, and whose kindness she repays by serving him faithfully for what she thinks are three days but which are actually thirty years." She is then returned in safety to her now aged mother, and tale concludes "They sat together the whole evening in great joy, then went to bed serenely and calmly, but the next morning the neighbors found them both dead."

The manuscript dates from only four years after the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and is characteristic of the unsettling tone and apparent moral vacuum of many of the Grimms’s tales. There are no records of an autograph Grimm tale selling at international auction since the present manuscript sold in 1974: according to the catalogue of the Bodmer library, which has an early composite manuscript of 45 tales, "the Brothers Grimm systematically destroyed all the preliminary work for their edition of the fairy tales, probably in order to prevent the comparison between the handwritten versions and later printed edition." Dear Mili was first published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1988, translated by Ralph Manheim, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak.