This diploma thesis is about a fairy tale, about its classification to classic and modern fairy tale and the historical review of fairy tales worldwide as well as the Croatian ones. There are various explanations of what a fairy tale is and one of them describes it as a story which has miraculous content, with its own categories of space, time and cause. Its specialty is that it emphasizes wonder, fantasy and fictitiousness. The most famous Croatian women writers of fairy tales are presented in this thesis. Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, a Croatian writer who acquired the name “Croatian Andersen” because of her fairy tales. She started her literary work on the private level, writing for her own children, and continuing it with impressionist poetry, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić chose a different path, away from the literary mainstream introducing Slavic Mythology into the classic fairy tale frame as well as the Croatian folklore and Christian worldview. Her pen produced the most important work Croatian Tales of Long Ago which unites eight fairy tales. The way toward (post)modern fairy tale was paved by women writers Sunčana Škrinjarić and Nada Iveljić. Sunčana Škrinjarić enriched contemporary fairy tale with her numerous modern fairy tales. The thesis also looks into her work based on a fairy tale, into the structure of literary reality, characters and means which are recognizable in the modern fairy tale. The third author analyzed in this thesis is Nada Iveljić. Her collection Šestinski kišobran is used to examine the author’s experience of folk and art fairy tales as well as the folk treasure and cultural heritage in general. The structure and the meaning of her fairy tales is also analyzed. The thesis is also about the influence, connection, similarities and differences in writing fairy tales of the three women writers. Similarities and differences between their poetics is analyzed in an effort to form a bigger picture of the position, type and function of a fairy tale in the context of Croatian (children’s) literature.