Leonora Blanche Alleyne

Lang was born 8 March 1851 in Clifton, Bristol, the youngest daughter and seventh child of Charles Thomas Alleyne (1798–1872), a plantation owner in Barbados, and his wife Margaret, sister of Henry Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare.

She received a "usual desultory education as a day girl at a fashionable school of the period in Clifton" before she met her husband, Scots writer Andrew Lang.

[9] Nora and a team of other writers, who were mostly women and included May Kendall and Violet Hunt, translated these into English and adapted them to suit Victorian and Edwardian notions of propriety.

[16] Critics and educational researches of the day had previously judged fairy tales' "unreality, brutality, and escapism to be harmful for young readers, while holding that such stories were beneath the serious consideration of those of mature age".

[17] The Langs' collections did much to shift this public perception of fairy stories as unsuitable for children and unworthy of critical analysis.

Other children's authors, including E. Nesbit, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, were influenced by the Langs' books.

"[18] Booker prize-winning novelist Margaret Atwood, whose work often reinvents and re-imagines fairy stories, "recollects reading Lang with wonder at the age of ten".