Eventually Psyche succumbs to her curiosity but accidentally scars her husband with a candle. There she is directed to never seek to see the face of her husband, who visits and makes love to her in the dark of night. The Ancient Roman tale starts with Psyche’s banishment (by the jealous Venus) to a mountaintop, in order to be wed to a murderous beast. Cupid is sent to destroy her but instead falls in love and flies her away to his castle. This myth, written in the 2nd Century CE by Apuleius, is one of the oldest tales and many believe it to be the first ever literary fairy tale. It could be that it has roots in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, the ancient chronicle from the Latin novel Metamorphoses. It is thought by some scholars that Beauty and the Beast story may have a much longer history. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – The Fairy Book, Warwick Goble, 1923. The wicked fairy had tried to murder Belle, so she could marry her father the king, and Belle was put in the place of a merchant’s dead daughter to protect her. The queen left him in care of an evil fairy, who tried to seduce him when he became an adult when he refused, she transformed him into a beast.īelle’s story reveals that she is not really a merchant’s daughter but the offspring of a king and a good fairy. The Beast was a young prince who lost his father, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. In this original novella length tale, the back-story of both Belle and the Beast is given. It was over one-hundred pages long and involved a ‘stupid’ Beast, who suffered from more than just his change of appearance. Originally published in La Jeune Américaine, et Les Contes Marins in 1740, Villeneuve’s La Belle et La Bête was an original piece of storytelling. The original story of Beauty and the Beast was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve. Here we cast our minds back to the aristocratic salons of 17 th century France. Who Wrote the Original Beauty and the Beast? Origins of Fairy Tales from Around the World.

Author of the beauty myth