Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance by Jane Harrington & Khoa Le

The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun

We all know the fairy tale writers Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm, yet few of us know the true precurors of the literary genre – seven seventeenth-century female French (conteuses) who weaved the first stories known as "fairy tales."

The sixty-plus tales they wrote and published starred strong females on quests that mirrored the challenges the writers themselves faced under the patriarchy, specifically the misogynistic and homophobic reign of Louis XIV. Over the century-long spell that their stories were popular, however, forces would work to erase them, to cast them from the fairy tale canon in favor of male tellers. The headstong princesses that had lived in the conteuses' pages were replaced by the types we call classic: the obedient Cinderella, naive Snow White, silent Litle Mermaid, and flat out unconscious Sleeping Beauty.

In Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance, the salon sisters' forgotten characters are awakened in revamped versions of a dozen of the original tales. Revived, too, are the authors themselves, in deeply researched histories by fairy tale scholar and reteller Jane Harrington, who has wielded her own pen in tribute to the spicy, oft-harrowing lives of these daring and brilliant women who shaped one of our most beloved literary traditions.