When you think of fairy tales, what comes to mind? Most likely, you think of the fairy tales penned by the Brothers Grimm, stories such as Cinderella, Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin perhaps. You might then be surprised to discover that the concept of the fairy tale can be credited to a French woman – the Baroness Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy, a remarkable proto-feminist author and the protagonist of Melissa Ashley’s latest novel, The Bee and the Orange Tree.
“I was trying to write a contemporary fairy tale as a novel and I just got really stuck, and so I did some research into fairytales,” says Melissa, whose discovery of the Baroness was a literary game changer for her.
While she ended up writing quite a different novel (her acclaimed debut The Birdman’s Wife), the Baroness was never far from her imagination, and Melissa knew that she had to write a novel about her.
That novel is The Bee and the Orange Tree, which takes its readers back to early years of the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France. Louis presided over what became known as the golden age of the fairy tale (roughly between 1690 – 1725), and literature underwent a period of great innovation and freedom under his initially progressive rule.
As the Sun King became more devout and his reign more repressive, that innovation soon went underground as D’Aulnoy and her fellow writers began to run literary salons out of their bedchambers. There, they performed the fairy tales that they wrote and encouraged their mostly female guests to write some of their own. It was an impressive feat for a time where women had little to no freedom, married young and were unable to work, keep their own money or apply for divorce.
“They used their ingenuity, their intelligence and their creativity to change the circumstances of their lives, to make their life more pleasurable and meaningful perhaps in a literary sense when there were very material circumstances in their lives that they couldn’t change,” says Melissa. “They were using literature to survive.”
Melissa visited Booktopia to sign copies of her book, before sitting down for a podcast with Ben Hunter and myself. Have a listen below and grab a signed copy of The Bee and the Orange Tree here before they’re all gone!
The Bee and the Orange Tree
It’s 1699, and the salons of Paris are bursting with the creative energy of fierce, independent-minded women.
But outside those doors, the patriarchal forces of Louis XIV and the Catholic Church are moving to curb their freedoms. In this battle for equality, Baroness Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy invents a powerful weapon: ‘fairy tales’. When Marie Catherine’s daughter, Angelina, arrives in Paris for the first time, she is swept up in the glamour and sensuality of the city, where a woman may live outside the confines of the church or marriage...
About the Contributor
Olivia Fricot
Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.
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