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

Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance is the story of seven fabulous, free-thinking salon writers of 17th Century France who wielded their pens as an act of protest and launched a sensation that swept across Europe long before the Brothers Grimm were even born. It was these women—conteuses, they called themselves—who coined the phrase “fairy tale.” The seventy-plus stories 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 tales were popular, however, forces would work to erase them, to cast them from the fairy tale canon in favor of male tellers. The headstrong princesses that had lived on the conteuses’ pages were replaced by the types we call classic: the obedient Cinderella, naive Snow White, silent Little Mermaid, and flat-out unconscious Sleeping Beauty. But now 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.