On her web site, Eloisa James says that her Happily Ever After series arose from the questions generated when she was reading Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, Yellow Fairy Book, and others aloud to her daughter and found herself wondering “What on earth was Cinderella’s prince thinking when he set up the infamous ball? How did Beauty feel about getting that particular nickname? And what would the princess in The Princess and the Pea think of her future mother-in-law, once she learned of the tests?” She answers these questions in A Kiss at Midnight (2010), When Beauty Tamed the Beast (2011), and The Duke Is Mine (2011). She also follows in the footsteps of her father, poet Robert Bly, in reworking traditional tales.
James begins her series with a revisionary Cinderella, the most popular fairy tale generally, and most popular within romance fiction. The oldest datable version of Cinderella is a Chinese tale from the 9th century A. D. The version most familiar to Western audiences is the 1697 version of Charles Perrault, the version on which the Disney film was based and the version that James acknowledges in her author’s notes for A Kiss at Midnight. Scholars believe that Perrault modified his story to please the members of the French court. Writer Jane Yolen sees in Perrault’s character a young woman who “demonstrates the well-bred seventeenth-century female traits of gentility, grace, and selflessness, even to the point of graciously forgiving her wicked stepsisters and finding them noble husbands.”
James not only uses Perrault’s tale, but she also follows his example of cutting the character of Cinderella from the fabric of contemporary values. Kate Daltry is no saintly, suffering Disney Cinderella; in the first chapter, the reader sees her as an angry, embattled heroine who has been the protector of servants and tenants since her father’s death. In fact, it is this concern that gives her stepmother a means of forcing Kate to do her bidding rather than this Cinderella’s meek submission to villainous authority. I loved Kate. From the fierce protector of chapter one to the drowsy princess of the final chapter, she is fully human and wholly enchanting.
James incorporates many of the traditional elements into her story. Heroine with a good and loving heart—check; dead mother—check; absent father—check; heroine as target of step-mother’s venom—check; The Shoe—check. AKAM even boasts a witty transformation of the rats from Charles Perrault’s version. But for every traditional element James uses, she adds a twist to the conventions. Mariana, the stepmother, is appropriately vain, selfish, and vindictive, but she has only one daughter rather than the traditional pair, and this daughter, Victoria, is a far cry from the “mean girls” of the older tale. There is a wonderful twist to the stepsister’s story that I won’t mention for fear of spoilers, but if you’ve read the excerpts, you will be prepared for it. James’s prince is no closer to the traditional fairy tale prince that Kate is to the angelic Cinderella. I’ve always thought the prince in the usual tale was rather boring. He’s little more than a handsome face, overflowing coffers, and a means to the HEA for the deserving heroine. EJ’s prince, in contrast, is no cipher. Gabriel is arrogant, intelligent, responsible, conflicted, and lusty. The last is important. AKAM is a 21st-century romance novel, after all.
The feminist in me rejoices that Kate, with her godmother’s help and her mother’s legacy, saves herself. I further rejoice that Eloisa James makes clear that while Gabriel has the power to break Kate’s heart, she can survive and build a life should he make the wrong choice. I rejoice yet again that it is Gabriel who has to prove himself worthy of Kate, not by meeting an externally imposed criterion for beauty (small feet for the traditional Cinders Girl) but by recognizing the supremacy of love.
In When Beauty Tamed the Beast, her second fairytale-based romance novel, James again combines elements of the traditional story with subtle subversions of it to weave a tale rich with humor, high in sizzle factor, and substantive in its portrayal of love as a healing, transforming power.
Scholars have identified 179 Beauty and the Beast tales from different countries, and most romance readers can easily list several favorite treatments of the tale. James’s take on the story is unique among those I’ve read. Traditionally, the heroine is the youngest of three sisters, and her virtue equals her beauty. James begins her story with Linnet’s virtue being questioned, and Linnet’s beauty has a sensual quality that is a marked contrast to the traditional innocent beauty. Linnet’s aunt says to her, “That dimple, and something in your eyes and about your mouth. You look like a wanton.” Beauty is often described as a booklover (Think Disney’s Belle), and Linnet’s intelligence is as important as her beauty. Moreover, it marks her as a misfit in London society. Her aunt cautions her,
“I’ve told you time and time again, all that cleverness does you no good. People would like a lady to be beautiful, but they expect her to be ladylike, in short: sweet, compliant, and refined.”
One of the ways the reader understands that Linnet belongs in Piers’s world is that the intelligence, tartness, assertiveness, and earthiness that had to be hidden in the polite world are the very qualities that make her a suitable match for the Beast.
Piers is no more a conventional Beast than Linnet is a conventional Beauty; I’m quite certain he’s the first Beast who is a practicing physician. The Beast most often is imaged as a lion-like creature, although various versions have portrayed him as looking like a bear, a warthog, and an elephant. Piers, on the other hand, looks rough and uncivilized, but Linnet is aware of his physical appeal and power almost immediately.
Her first impression of the rude man was that he was big—huge, in fact. The blond doctor was tall and lean, but this man was even taller, and much bigger. His shoulders seemed twice as wide as those of the other men. He was all muscle, with a kind of predatory force that looked out of place next to a sickbed. In fact, he looked as if he should be out leading hordes of Vikings . . . berserking, or whatever it was those men did for a living.
James reveals in her “Historical Note” that the cantankerous Piers with his crippled leg was inspired not by earlier Beasts, but by TV’s Dr. Gregory House. House fans will recognize similarities to the acerbic doctor in the Beast’s difficult relationship with his father, his battle with chronic pain, his skills as a diagnostician, and his disregard for medical protocol as well as in his temperament and sharp wit.
James also does some interesting gender role reversal in her tale. It is Linnet, not Piers, who undergoes a physical transformation, and it is she who asks the question traditionally posed by the Beast: Do you love me?
In the most emotionally powerful scene in the book, it is Piers who finds Linnet and brings water to revive her. The most traditional part of WBTTB may well be the ending when once again love proves redemptive and a fruitful marriage provides the HEA.
“The Princess and the Pea,” James’s inspiration for the third book in her fairy tale series, is a less predictable choice for revision. First, it’s quite brief, and then there’s the matter of tests conducted by the potential mother-in-law and a princess with super-sensitive skin. As with her other revisions, James incorporates elements of the tale into her romance to the degree that the fairy tale narrative is recognizable, but she departs from traditional material to suit her own purposes. In The Duke Is Mine, the “pea” is a cleverly handled but minor point, the duchess who wrote the book, literally, on what separates “real” duchesses from unsuitable ones is forced to change her opinion, and “realness” becomes a criterion applied to all the characters, not just the heroine.
Like the princess in the fairy tale, when Olivia first meets “the prince,” she is a refugee from the storm. Hans Christian Andersen’s tale describes the princess as “in a sad condition; the water trickled down from her hair, and her clothes clung to her body.” But even in this pitiable condition, Andersen’s princess is confident that she’s the real thing. On the other hand, Olivia doesn’t feel like a real princess—or even a real duchess. She is convinced that she is totally unsuited physically and temperamentally to be a duchess. Olivia is everything Quin’s mother finds most unsuitable for a real duchess, and it is not she but her sister Georgiana who is being tested by the reigning matriarch. But Olivia is no passive princess who goes meekly off to sleep on twenty mattresses. She challenges Quin from their first exchange. I loved her irrepressibility and vulnerability and determination to be herself. I loved that she was more earthy than ethereal. I loved her wit and her bawdy sense of humor. I loved that she matures and sees with clearer vision by the novel’s end. I loved her intelligence, strength, and honor. I loved her understanding heart.
And Quin! I fell hard for him from the first description.
. . . The Duke of Sconce was the sort of man repulsed by the very idea of fairy tales. He neither read nor thought about them (let alone believed in them); the notion of playing a role in one would have been preposterous, and he would have rejected outright the notion that he resembled in any fashion the golden-haired, velvet-clad princes generally found in such tales.
Tarquin Brook-Chatfield, Duke of Sconce—known as Quin to his intimates, who numbered exactly two—was more like the villain in those stories than the hero, and he knew it.
I loved Quin’s intelligence, his passion for mathematics, and his logic. Most of all, I loved his overwhelming feelings for Olivia.
This is a story rich in humor, and I smiled a lot and sometimes laughed aloud while reading it. But as the story unfolded, I became aware how much more there was to the novel than a few hours entertainment. James takes a company of flawed characters and from the hero and heroine to Quin’s arrogant mother to the plebeian pet, Lucy, shows love making them all “real.”
Quin’s mother might have been just another controlling mother, but James reveals that it is not false pride but genuine love for her son who was devastated by his first marriage that motivates her actions. Even the manipulative father of Rupert, Olivia’s fiancé who is developmentally delayed, becomes endearing when the reader sees his pride and love for his son. Quin’s foil, his cousin Justin (a Bieber tribute in honor of James’s daughter), might have been shallow, but instead possesses an enviable joie de vivre.
Georgiana’s perfection would have been boring had the reader not seen the unconventional ambition that lay beneath her polished exterior. And most surprising, Rupert, who in less skillful hands might have been little more than a buffoon, becomes the most real of all—not because he ends up a military hero but because he had all along the sensitivity and compassion that are the very definition of realness, as the story of the Princess and the Pea illustrates.
The Ugly Duchess, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling,” is scheduled for releases in 2012. I’m eager to see what James does with the fourth, and likely the final, novel in her Happily Ever After series.
Janga spent decades teaching literature and writing to groups ranging from twelve-year-olds to college students. She is currently a freelance writer, who sometimes writes about romance fiction, and an aspiring writer of contemporary romance, who sometimes thinks of writing an American historical romance. She can be found at her blog Just Janga and tweeting obscure bits about writers as @Janga724.
