When we think of fairy tales, we tend to think of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and, of course, Walt Disney. But what if some of the most important names in fairy-tale history have been missing from the story?
In seventeenth-century France, a remarkable group of women gathered in literary salons to write, debate, and reinvent stories filled with clever heroines, powerful fairies, dangerous marriages, and women determined to make their own choices. Their tales were enormously popular. They were published, performed, and read across Europe. They even helped establish the literary genre we now call the fairy tale. And then, over generations, many of their names disappeared from the story.
Today on Wicked Women, I’m joined by author Jane Harrington to discuss the women who helped shape the fairy-tale tradition, the extraordinary lives behind their stories, and how literary history came to remember the men while forgetting so many of the women. We’ll talk about rebellious princesses, seventeenth-century literary salons, censorship, scandal, and the painstaking detective work involved in recovering women whose stories have been scattered across archives for centuries.
Because sometimes the most fascinating part of a familiar story is discovering who was written out of it.
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