Madame d'Aulnoy

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy, was a French writer of the seventeenth century, born in Normandy in 1652 and died in Paris in 1705. She wrote in French, and her name is closely tied to the emergence of the fairy tale as a literary genre, which makes her an important figure for understanding the adult fiction of her time.

She came from a noble family. According to some sources, she married young, around 1666, François de la Motte, Baron d'Aulnoy, who was about thirty years older and known as a gambler. In 1669 the baron was accused of treason; the two men implicated in the accusation were executed, and the family was drawn into the scandal. After she became estranged from her husband, she led an itinerant life. She probably travelled through England, and she may have visited Spain, although her stay there is debated. Back in Paris, she hosted a salon that attracted aristocrats and princes.

Her output includes pseudo-memoirs, historical novels and collections of tales. Her accounts of Spain and of the English court, published in the early 1690s, were read largely as entertainment, and their value as historical sources was questioned later. Her stories were told in a conversational tone, suited to the salon, and her heroines are often witty and determined, struggling to avoid forced marriages. They were written for adult readers rather than children.

Her legacy rests mainly on Les Contes des Fées (1697), the book that gave the genre its name and that includes the first story with a character called Prince Charmant. Her tales reached England in versions far removed from the original. She was admitted to the Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua under the name of Clio, the muse of history.