gabrielle suzanne de villeneuve beauty and the beast

But rather than just fantasy or fable, her rendering of Beauty and the Beast is actually more a critique of women’s rights of the time, hidden behind layers of marital guidance. Beasley.French writer Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780).ĭe Beaumont published approximately 70 volumes during her literary career and was celebrated as a writer of fairy tales. Reviewed by Adrion Dula.Įighteenth Century Fiction 34.2 (2022): 264–265. She is author of Gender and Voice in the French Novel, 1730–1782 (2004) and, in this series, edited and translated with Sharon Diane Nell, Jacques Du Bosc’s L’Honnête Femme: The Respectable Woman in Society and the New Collection of Letters and Responses by Contemporary Women (2014).Ĭhoice 58.8 (April 2021). Marianne Legault, Associate Professor of French, University of British Columbia Okanagan CampusĪURORA WOLFGANG is Professor of French at Michigan State University. It offers in addition a biographical account of Villeneuve, and a historical overview of the fairy tale as a genre developed largely by women writers of seventeenth-century France.' Wolfgang’s volume includes unique content never translated before: the tale’s original frame, dedication, preface, and, perhaps most intriguingly, the insertion of erotic passages taken out by most of the previous translations and editions. 'Aurora Wolfgang presents Anglophone readers with the opportunity to examine the original version of the (now) popularized tale of Beauty and the Beast, published in 1740 by an important but little understood woman writer of eighteenth-century France, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.

The introduction seeks to illuminate the publication of Beauty and the Beast in its historical and literary context, and brings to life the dynamic female characters that first populated this enchanting tale: the courageous Beauty, the Fairy Queen, the Amazon Queen, the Lady Fairy, and the powerful, but mischievous elderly fairy. This edition is the first integral English translation of Villeneuve’s original tale. While her novels are rarely read today, her compelling fairytale has become universally recognized. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the little-known author of Beauty and the Beast, was a successful novelist and fairytale writer in mid eighteenth-century France.

Winner of the 2020 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Award for a Scholarly Edition in Translation

Gabrielle suzanne de villeneuve beauty and the beast