Q&A with Jane Harrington

 

Jane Harrington is the author of the new book Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun. Her other books include the novel In Circling Flight. She teaches at W&L University and at Hollins University. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance?

 

A: About eight years ago I started teaching the fairy tale at Washington & Lee University, which led me to reading scholarship I hadn’t before. And there were these women—popular and prolific salon writers of 17th-century France who’d launched the first vogue for fairy tales and even coined the term (conte de fées).

 

I’d grown up believing that fairy tales were the province of men: Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm—even though few fairies flutter through the pages of any of their stories. I began to wonder, Who were these women and why were their stories missing from the fairy tale canon?

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I started with the existing English-language scholarship on these women, which I quickly found to be not only lacking but often inaccurate. That was the first surprise, though I soon came to understand why. Like many women in history, the accounts of their lives have been tainted by negative bias and deliberate erasure.

 

I knew I’d have to access French sources to understand their stories, which presented a challenge, since that language is not in my skillset! But thanks to (1) amazing librarians, (2) a daughter fluent in French who took time from her graduate studies to help me when I was really desperate, and (3) advances in translation technology (yes, AI…sigh), I was able to learn a great deal about these women and their tales. Many surprises there, as you’ll see if you read the book.

Q: How did you choose the stories to include in the book, and how would you say these women’s stories differed from men’s stories of the same period?

 

A: These women wrote more than 70 tales, many quite long, so selecting the 12 that ended up in the book and writing my retellings was almost as time-consuming as researching their lives.

 

I wanted the tales to be ones with protagonists who are resisting societal norms in ways that reflect the authors’ own acts of resistance against the patriarchy under Louis XIV.

 

Most of their tales contain strong female characters, which stands in stark contrast to the “classic” princesses of Charles Perrault (who was a regular at these women’s salons) and later the Grimms, and later Walt Disney: all young women who are submissive, silent, or asleep.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen and what does it signify to you?

A: The title came to me very early on, before I even understood what these women had endured and how their tales were, in themselves, acts of resistance. So it felt kind of magic, like those words were an incantation pulling me through the research.

 

I was super pleased that the editor who acquired the book at Black Dog & Leventhal liked the title, and when the illustrator, Khoa Le, got her hands on it…magical, yeah. How I love that cover!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: The more I learned about these women’s stories, the more angry I found myself at the powerful men who had destroyed their lives and legacies—whether by exiling them to convents or prison castles for being “unruly,” or omitting them from the literary history of the era or the fairy tale canon.

 

So, in an act of my own resistance, I’m now crafting a novel set in the afterlife in which these women get to confront their patriarchal oppressors. Genre-wise, think George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo meets Lauren Groff’s Matrix. It’s very cathartic writing it!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I would just say that I can’t wait to hear from readers of Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance, so please reach out via Facebook or Instagram, or my website, www.janeharrington.com.

 

The book comes out in August, but it can be ordered now. Most sellers seem to have pre-order discounts, which are also pre-tariff (which could turn out to be a significant savings, given how hard publishers are being hit by new trade policies). My fave online seller is Bookshop, since it supports indie stores!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb