Welcome To The Archive for "Beauty and The Beast"! Yay!

Beauty and the Beast is a traditional fairy tale written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740 in La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins. Her lengthy version was abridged, rewritten, and published first by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756 in Magasin des enfants and by Andrew Lang in the Blue Fairy Book of his Fairy Book series in 1889, to produce the version(s) most commonly retold. It was influenced by some earlier stories, such as “Cupid and Psyche”, written by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensi in The Golden Ass in the 2nd century AD, and “The Pig King”, an Italian fairytale published by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in The Facetious Nights of Straparola.

There have been several movies and television series based on the original story.