The women who gave birth to the fairy tale genre in the Salons of Louis XIV’s Versailles were brilliant, subversive, and scandalous – yet it is surprisingly difficult to find solid information about them in the English-speaking world.
This book provides a succinct and enlightening history of the fairy tale salons, and biographies of the key Salonnières, Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, and Henriette-Julie de Murat, plus the better-known Charles Perrault and others.
Among the many stories these Salonnières wrote, few of which are easily found today, twelve are reproduced here, both as summaries of the original stories, plus the full retellings written by the storytellers who created the Salonline webseries for the Australian Fairy Tale Society, a group dedicated to understanding and interpreting fairy tales for contemporary Australians.
