[Eleanor Farjeon, children's writer.] Typed chatty retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, under the title 'The Simple Facts', and ending 'don't believe a word I say'. Signed by Farjeon 'From E. F.', with her address.

1p, 4to. Typescript with a couple of minor autograph corrections. Unpublished, but perhaps relating to her 1945 book 'Ariadne and the Bull'. At foot, in Farjeon's autograph: 'From E. F. | 20 Perrin's Walk | N.W.3.' In fair condition, on aged and worn paper, with nicking and loss at edges. A chatty and entertaining retelling of the story. As an example of the tone, early on Farjeon writes: 'The Minotaur was a monster with the gigantic body of a man topped by a bull's head; his father was a bull and his mother was Pasiphae, Minos's Queen. Minos hushed up the family scandal with the help of the cunning Cretan inventor Daedalus, who built the famous Cretan labyrinth in which the monster was imprisoned, and from which it was almost impossible to find the way out once you were in.' She notes how Theseus 'very ungratefully' abandoned Ariadne on Naxos, and that he later married Phaedra, 'with tragic results - but that's another story'; also that 'the wax which fastened the wings to [Icarus's] shoulders melted, with fatal results'. She quotes from a speech by 'Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons' in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', before concluding: 'Silenus was the lusty old toper in the Bacchanalian rout who attended on Bacchus, the beautiful young demi-god whom Silenus reared from his youth. | This is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know (Keats). | Now go ahead, and don't believe a word I say.'