It opens with an overview of Villeneuve's life and networks of relations. The introduction contains a wealth of information that grounds the tale within the broad context of eighteenth-century French society. The translation is beautifully wrought and is supported by a 72-page introduction, as well as numerous footnotes that make accessible to English readers and non-early-modern students and scholars the complex world and the position of Villeneuve within it that gave rise to the only tale within our contemporary fairy-tale canon penned solely by women, 'Beauty and the Beast.' Appearing in the Other Voice series, which seeks to restore the voices of early modern women, Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast is a welcome addition to the series. Neither Zipes nor Planché reproduced for English readers the tale's dedication, preface, or frame narrative about 'The Young American Girl' on her way back to Hispaniola after living for years in France, which inform the context and meaning of the tale. Planché's nineteenth-century translation in which erotic passages were eliminated. Although Jack Zipes includes a translation of this first recognizable version of 'Beauty and the Beast' in Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales, first published in 1989, Zipes's translation is based on J. As Aurora Wolfgang notes in the introduction to her new translation of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast, this is the first integral English translation of the novella-length tale from 1740.

Beauty and the beast gabrielle