Madame de Villeneuve’s The Story of the Beauty and the Beast: The Original French Fairytale (Unabridged)

Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (c. 1695–29 December 1755) was a French author influenced by Madame d’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault.

Madame de Villeneuve was born in La Rochelle. She is particularly noted for her La Belle et la Bête, which is the oldest known variant of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast. First published in ‘La jeune américaine, et les contes marins,’ it is over a hundred pages long, containing many subplots, and involving a genuinely savage—i.e. ‘stupid’—Beast, not merely a change of appearance.

Her lengthy version was abridged, rewritten, and published by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, to produce the version most commonly retold.

In 1767, she wrote a novel La Jardinière de Vincennes. She was a close friend of the controversial writer Claude Jolyot de Crébillon. She died in Paris.

Rachel Louise Lawrence is a British author who translates and adapts folk and fairy tales from original texts and puts them back into print, particularly the lesser-known British & Celtic variants.

Since writing her first story at the age of six, Rachel has never lost her love of writing and reading. A keen wildlife photographer and gardener, she is currently working on several writing projects.

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