Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story

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

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. While her novels are rarely read today, her compelling fairytale has become universally recognized. This edition is the first integral English translation of Villeneuve’s original tale. 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.

"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. 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. 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."

- Marianne Legault, Associate Professor of French, University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus

AURORA WOLFGANG is Professor of French at Michigan State University. 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).

REVIEWS
Choice 58.8 (April 2021). Reviewed by S. A. Dooley.
Early Modern Women 16.1 (2021): 189–193. Reviewed by Adrion Dula.
Eighteenth Century Fiction 34.2 (2022): 264–265. Reviewed by Rori Bloom.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 56.4 (2023): 640–642. Reviewed by Charlotte Trinquet Du Lys.
Marvels & Tales 35.1 (2021): 199–201. Reviewed by Anne E. Duggan.
Women in French Studies 31 (2023), pp. 165–167. Reviewed by Kelsey B. Madsen.
Women's Writing (2021). Reviewed by Faith E. Beasley. https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2021.1886716.