Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne‐Marie (1711–80), popular French writer of didactic literature. Educated in a convent school in Rouen, she later became a teacher in the schools which, at that time, were being developed for children of all social classes. In 1741 she married M. de Beaumont, a dissolute libertine, and the marriage was annulled after two years. In 1745 she departed for England, where she earned her living as a governess. During her long residence in London, she made a name for herself by publishing short stories in magazines and producing collections of anecdotes, stories, fairy tales, commentaries, and essays directed at specific social and age groups, all with a strong pedantic bent. For instance, she published a series of pedagogical works with the following titles: Le Magasin des enfants (1757), Le Magasin des adolescents (1760), Le Magasin des pauvres (1768), Le Mentor moderne (1770), Manuel de la jeunesse (1773), and Magasin des dévotes (1779). In 1762 she returned to France, where she continued her voluminous production, and retired to a country estate in Haute‐Savoie in 1768. Among her major works of this period were Mémoires de la Baronne de Batteville (1776), Contes moraux (1774), and OEuvres mêlées (1775). By the time of her death, she had written over 70 books.
Mme Leprince de Beaumont's major fairy tales were all published in Le Magasin des Enfants (translated as The Young Misses' Magazine), which was designed to frame stories, history lessons, and moral anecdotes told by a governess to young girls. Among the fairy tales were: ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (‘Beauty and the Beast’), ‘Le Prince Chéri’ (‘Prince Darling’), ‘Le Prince Désir’ (‘Prince Desire’), ‘Le Prince Charmante’ (‘Prince Charming’), ‘La Veueve et les deux filles’ (‘The Widow and her Two Daughters’), ‘Aurore et Aimée’, ‘Le Pêcheur et le Voyageur’ (‘The Fisherman and the Traveller’), ‘Joliotte’, and ‘Bellotte et Laidronette’. Her version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which was based on Mme Gabrielle‐Suzanne de Villeneuve's longer narrative of 1740, is perhaps the most famous in the world. Here Belle, the youngest daughter of a bankrupt merchant, is willing to sacrifice herself to a savage beast to save her father. Her conduct at the beast's palace is so exemplary that she not only provides the means to restore her father's good name, but she also saves the beast from certain death. Mme Leprince de Beaumont's emphasis in all her fairy tales was on the proper upbringing of young girls like Beauty, and she continually stressed industriousness, self‐sacrifice, modesty, and diligence in all her tales as the qualities young ladies and men must possess to attain happiness. Aside from ‘Beauty and the Beast’, several other fairy tales have remained somewhat popular in France and reflect Mme Leprince de Beaumont's major theme: the transformation of bestial behaviour into goodliness. For instance, ‘Prince Darling’ concerns a conceited and tyrannical prince who is turned into various animals until he resolves to be good and gentle. ‘Prince Desire’ depicts a prince who does not want to accept the fact that he has a huge nose but learns that he must accept his faults if he wants to marry the Princess Mignonne. Mme Leprince de Beaumont was one of the first French writers to write fairy tales explicitly for children, and thus she kept her language and plot simple to convey her major moral messages. Though her style was limited by the lesson she wanted to teach, she was careful not to destroy the magic in her tales that triumphs despite her preaching.
Bibliography
- Clancy, Patricia, ‘A French Writer and Educator in England: Mme Le Prince de Beaumont’,
Studies on Voltaire , 201 (1982). - Hearne, Betsy, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale (1989).
- Kempton, Adrian, ‘Education and the Child in Eighteenth‐Century French Fiction’,
Studies on Voltaire , 124 (1974). - Pauly, Rebecca M., ‘Beauty and the Beast: From Fable to Film’,
Literature/Film Quarterly , 17.2 (1989). - Stewart, Joan Hinde, ‘Allegories of Difference: An Eighteenth‐Century Polemic’,
Romanic Review , 75 (May 1984). - Wilkins, Kay S., ‘Children's Literature in Eighteenth‐Century France’,
Studies on Voltaire , 176 (1979). - Zipes, Jack, “‘The Origins of the Fairy Tale’”, in Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994).
— Jack Zipes
