Fairy tales are a beautiful genre of literature, tracing cultural mindsets and priorities through time and across the globe. Their origin as oral tales makes them profoundly unique, as no two tellings were ever exactly the same. But at the same time, that can make it hard for anyone to trace their history.
There have been countless people who have collected, transcribed, created, and otherwise contributed to the genre of fairy tales we know today. I’ve talked about some of them before, and those are the ones that most people (or most people with an interest in fairy tales) know about, the big names.
But they’re far from the only ones. And I thought it was high time I started highlighting some of those less-well-known fairy tale writers.
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot was born in Paris in November of 1685. She was the daughter of a well-off family and, in 1706, married aristocrat Jean-Baptiste de Gaalon de Villeneuve. Their marriage was not a happy one, however, and within six months, Jean-Baptiste had squandered their not-insignificant inheritances and Gabrielle-Suzanne had requested a separation from her husband. Records show a daughter was born to the couple at some point, but it’s unclear whether she survived childhood or what became of her. In 1711, just five years after her marriage, Gabrielle-Suzanne found herself widowed at age 26.
Left alone and with no way to support herself, Gabrielle-Suzanne turned to work. She may have gotten involved (either through employment or a more personal relationship) with famous tragedian and royal literary censor of the time, Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, which would have put her in the center of the literary heart of France. Whether that’s true or not, she soon began writing and publishing her own work.
Gabrielle-Suzanne turned her pen to both fairy tales and novels, publishing a novella, two fairy tale collections, and four novels in her lifetime. Her most famous contribution to literature is undoubtedly La Belle et la Bête, a part of her 1740 fairy tale collection, La jeune américaine, et les contes marins. For those not fluent in French, that makes hers the oldest version of “Beauty and the Beast”. While inspired by some older stories (such as “Cupid and Psyche”), her story was an original one, and it served as a commentary on the plight of women, especially in regards to marriage and their own autonomy.
But her name is almost never associated with the story (possibly because she published some of her work anonymously, but I can’t confirm whether that fairy tale collection was). Even I didn’t realize she was the original author back when I did my analysis of how the story has changed over time. In 1756, within a year of Gabrielle-Suzanne’s death, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont published her own adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast”, shortening the story and adjusting it for a much younger audience. That’s the story that served as the basis for the Disney film most of us are familiar with. But over time, Gabrielle-Suzanne’s version was forgotten, fading into obscurity. I haven’t even been able to track down a copy of it to read (though I admit I don’t necessarily have a wide list of resources to draw from).
I’ll be honest, this was a hard blog post to write. Not because of the topic matter, but purely because there’s almost no readily available information about Gabrielle-Suzanne out there. Her main contribution to literature and fairy tales has gone almost unnoticed, and little information survives about her life (and the professional editor in me balks at using Wikipedia as a primary source).
But in the end, that difficulty is what made it so important to me to write this, even if it’s a shorter post. Because we may not know a lot about her life, but we do know one thing: Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve wrote the earliest version of “Beauty and the Beast”.
And she should be remembered for that.
Kate G. Jameson 