More than just make believe
Review of Jackie Wullschlager, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Life of a Storyteller.
Wullschlager is right to give Andersen the credit for being the first person to choose the fairy story as a literary form and then invent new ones, thereby paving the way for Lewis Carroll and the British “golden age” of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy literature for children, not to mention many European books of the same sort. The Grimms, working at the same period, collected and wrote up fairy tales, changing them massively in the process, but unlike Andersen they never dared to invent from scratch.
The Sunday Times