Mary Frere

MF , a studious late Victorian of wide interests, was a largely private writer, who won fame with her re-telling in English of South Indian folktales, fairy stories, and fables. These have been generally treated as her unassisted work, though she herself gave full credit to the Indian woman from whose mouth she heard them, Anna Liberata de Souza . They have sometimes, too, been regarded as children's literature. Apart from this one book, which attained the status of a classic, MF published only one play and a handful of poems.