Madame d'Aulnoy (1650–1705)

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, known as Madame d’Aulnoy, was born to an aristocratic French family in Barneville-la-Bertran, Normandy. In 1666, at about age 15, she was forced to marry François de la Motte, Baron d'Aulnoy, 30 years her senior. It was an unhappy union, and she was imprisoned in 1669 for plotting to kill her husband, but released the following year for lack of evidence. For the next 13 years, she traveled around Europe -- what she did during this period is still a mystery -- and then in 1685, bought a house on the rue Saint-Benoît in Paris. There she established a popular salon and began her literary career. Her first important novel, Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (The Story of Hypolitus, Count of Douglas), which appeared in 1690,was a great success and contained her first major fairy tale, "L’Ile de la félicité" ("The Island of Happiness"). She followed it up the same year with a bestselling pseudo-history, Mémoires de la cour d’Espagne (Memoirs of the Spanish Court) and in 1691 with an epistolary travel narrative, Relation du voyage d’Espagne (An Account of a Journey to Spain). Eventually she published several volumes of fairy tales: Les Contes des Fées, I–III (1696-1697), Les Contes de Fées, IV (1698), and Contes Nouveaux ou les Fées à la Mode, I–IV (New Tales, or Fairies in Fashion, 1698). Madame d’Aulnoy influenced other writers and the vogue for writing fairy tales among other aristocratic women in late 17th century France. It was with a 1699 translation of Les Contes de Fées published in the UK that the term "fairy tales" entered the English language, along with the first use of the name "Prince Charming."