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Current Issue Explore Categories Archive Shop SubscribeLogin LiteratureLiterary criticism Welcome to the TLS Winner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902. Literary criticism|Book Review HAPPILY EVER AFTER? CANONICAL LITERATURE’S NEGLECTED HEROINES By Vanessa Braganza * * * * May 17, 2024 Read this issue An illustration by Walter Crane for Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s story “The Hind in the Wood”|© Historic Illustrations/Alamy May 17, 2024 Read this issue IN THIS REVIEW THE LOST PRINCESS Women writers and the history of classic fairy tales 264pp. Reaktion. £16. Anne E. Duggan LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Login or subscribe now Two literary-historical paths diverged in a wood. One, the story of fairy tales lined with names such as Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, is familiar to us. The other, the path that Anne E. Duggan treads in The Lost Princess, is paved with names most readers will not recognize: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force and Henriette-Julie de Murat, among others. But this more obscure route was not always the path less travelled. The Lost Princess follows a four-century-long trail of crumbs back to the early-modern French women writers, the conteuses, who were once as important as their now better-known male counterparts. Focusing on d’Aulnoy, the first and most influential of this group, Duggan tells a story that significantly predates the Grimm/Disney tradition – and, for several centuries, constituted the dominant version. These versions placed female protagonists in dominant narrative positions, perhaps in response to their authors’ social subjugation. Like their heroines, the conteuses themselves were rebellious, but they didn’t always live happily ever after. At the age of thirteen d’Aulnoy was married to an unfaithful, financially beleaguered baron, thirty years her senior. When she took a lover and tried to have her husband convicted of treason, she was consigned to a convent under Louis XIV’s orders. Other conteuses were likewise punished for their affairs, lesbianism and possession of pornography. Seventeenth-century France boasted a social regime in which old patriarchal habits died hard. The literary salon emerged as a locus of women’s intellectual and artistic liberation, empowering the conteuses to reimagine their lives through fairy tales. Although the convent perhaps provided d’Aulnoy with fruitful time to work on books such as Histoire d’Hippolyte, comte de Duglas (1690) and Les Contes des fées (1697), the bright, conversational style of her stories may be traced to the salon she had established at her house on Rue Saint-Benoît in Paris. Each of Duggan’s chapters unfolds a genealogy of a well-known tale, from the conteuses’ version to its influence. Strikingly, the victimized princess rescued by a prince, a trope now part of the genre’s DNA, hardly surfaces; the original Cinderella (“Finette-Cinders”) murders the first of two cruel stepmothers and splatters her stepsisters with mud on the way to claim her slipper; there are two antecedents to “Beauty and the Beast” (“The Ram”; “The Green Serpent”), in one of which the Beast dies and Beauty becomes queen of her own... * * * * You have no more free articles available ENJOY UNLIMITED DIGITAL ACCESS, FREE FOR 1 MONTH Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in here KEEP READING Literary criticism|Book Review PIPES, AIRGUNS AND WYNDS Conan Doyle’s cerebral hero and his afterlife By Emelyne Godfrey Literary criticism|Book Review BLOOD WILL HAVE BLOOD Ambiguity in Shakespeare’s theatre of war By Andrew Hadfield Literary criticism|Book Review ‘I AM FOR SHAKESPEARE’ British art and drama’s emancipation from the French Academy By Bruce Boucher Literary criticism|Book Review BRIDGE BUILDER Two studies of Hart Crane By Victoria Moul THE TLS NEWSLETTER Join 40,000 readers to enjoy a regular dose of inspiration and motivation, delivered to your inbox every Thursday. You information will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy Send THANKS FOR SIGNING UP! 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