I’m looking for a Hans Christian Andersen collection of fairy tales from the early 90s. I read it when around 1994-6 but it could have been published a little earlier. I remember it for its Little Mermaid illustrations. They were so beautiful and seemed to glow. Lots of pale mermaids with long blonder hair. Like angels. The pages I remember most are the pictures where the Little Mermaid’s sisters are hoisting each other up out of the sea to hand her a dagger to kill the prince. The last page is the Little Mermaid floating to the sky as an angel after she kills herself to save the prince. It was hardcover and I believe it also had The Princess and the Pea and The Tin Solider stories in it, but I think different illustrators worked on them.
Hope this was enough to be helpful. I tried to look up books published in that time frame with Hans Christian Andersen author credits, but couldn’t find a comprehensive list.
I’m wondering if this might be part of the Well Loved Tales series published between the 1960s and the 1990s by Ladybird.
I had the Little Mermaid one and a few of the others and I remember illustrations similar to the ones you describe.
The Grahame Johnstone sisters illustrated the Little Mermaid. Their stories tended to appear in different compilations (I have two books of fairytales by them with some stories repeated).
I know it appeared in their Stories from Hans Christian Anderson but the other stories are different to the ones you describe
You can see some of the illustrations here
http://magicalvintagechildrensbooks.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/stories-from-hans-christian-andersen.html
Could it possibly be the Classics Illustrated Edition (1992)? That’s the hardcover collection I remember reading in the 90s, and it has those three stories in it and a number of different illustrators represented (Rackham and Dulac, among others). Some of the illustrations are a little darker in tone than the ones you’re describing, but I also remember that “glowing” quality to some of them, so maybe it’s a match.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/782940.Fairy_Tales_from_Hans_Christian_Andersen