The Glass Girl

The Glass Girl is a fairytale from Michael and Jonathan Burch's Collection, Bedtime Stories. It is one of the most famous stories from the collection, and inspired many later works such as the Euon Wright film Someplace in Between.

Summary

The story begins with a poor glassmaker and his wife, who are expecting a child. When the mother becomes very ill, they seek the help of a healer. The healer tells the couple that the mother will surely die, and refuses to heal her without payment. When the couple cannot offer payment, she offers to heal the mother if the couple will give her the child upon its birth. The glassmaker is appalled at the idea, but agrees. When the baby is born however, instead of bringing his daughter to the healer, he creates a lifelike baby out of glass, which he brings to her. The prince of the underworld has been watching all of these events, and, taking pity on the childless healer, breathes life into the glass, so that as the glassmaker gives the healer the baby, it becomes flesh and blood.
The healer is in love with her new daughter and dotes on her. But she also fears that someone will come to take her baby away, so she moves to a tower with no entrance but a window, far from the town, and raises her daughter alone inside. The girl grows up to be a beautiful young woman with very long golden hair, which her mother uses as a ladder to get into and out of the window.
One day, while her mother is gone, the glass girl is singing in her tower, and a prince, who happens to be walking by, overhears the song and is stunned by the beauty of the girl's voice. He tries to determine how to enter the tower, but cannot find a way. When he sees the healer coming, he hides in the bushes to see if she knows how to enter the tower. He sees her climb the glass girl's hair. Later, after she has left again, the prince calls to her to let her hair down from the window so he can climb it.
Never having left the tower, the girl is thrilled to meet a new person and demands to know anything and everything that he can tell her about the world outside. The prince comes back regularly to share his stories with the girl, and the two fall in love. He then proposes to her, but the girl hesitates, knowing that her mother would feel betrayed if she agreed. The prince promises her that her mother can live in the castle with them, and they need never be apart, and though the girl agrees, she tells the prince that she must speak to her mother about it by herself. The prince agrees to return the next night to take her and her mother to the castle and departs.
When her mother returns, the glass girl divulges her secret romance, and her desire to marry and for the two of them to live in the prince's castle. At this, the healer goes into a rage. She insists that the girl has betrayed her, and that she is only person to whom her daughter can ever belong. To keep her from the prince, the healer kills her and removes her hair, and cuts her body into pieces. Now dead, the body turns back to glass, which the woman buries in a nearby swamp. She returns to the tower and uses the girl's hair to lure the prince up. When he reaches the top of the tower, she tells him that her daughter will never belong to him, and pushes him out of the window. After the prince has plunged to his death, the healer realizes what she has done, and having lost the only thing in the world that brought her joy, she kills herself by also jumping out of the tower.
But again, the prince of the underworld has been watching these events, and upset that the giass girl and her prince were killed so young, he captured their souls and placed them in two new bodies, which he blessed so that they would not die until they had once again found each other and lived a life together.
As a final note, the story tells us that because the glass girl's body once knew life, it was never able to return entirely to glass, and in the swamp where the glass was buried, glass flowers grow.