The American illustrator Virginia Frances Sterrett died of tuberculosis today in 1931, at the age of just 30. She was diagnosed with the disease — at the time, tantamount to a death sentence— 11 years earlier at the age of 19 while she was working on her first commission from The Penn Publishing Company, to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales. Struggling with ill health over the next decade she would only manage to complete two more book commissions (Tanglewood Tales and Arabian Nights).

In his preface to Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne reveals the reservations he felt about adapting the Greek myths into child-friendly form. Knowing that many of the old legends are “hideous … melancholy … miserable. So for example in the retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur we learn of Procrustes, a man who ensured his visitors had the right size bed in uncompromising fashion.