Occupation Novelist Role Author Movies Beauty and the Beast | Name Jeanne-Marie de Children Elisabeth de Beaumont | |
Books Beauty and the Beast and Other Fairy Tales Similar People Gabrielle‑Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, Charles Perrault, Kirk Wise, Gary Trousdale, Jean Cocteau | ||
Learn English Through Story - Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Beauty and the Beast Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont audiobook Short Story
Marie Leprince de Beaumont (nee Vaimboult; 26 April 1711 – 8 September 1780) was a French author who wrote the best known version of Beauty and the Beast. She had a relationship with the spy for the British Thomas Pichon (1757–1760).
Contents
- Learn English Through Story Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont
- Beauty and the Beast Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont audiobook Short Story
- Life
- Works
- References
Life
She was born in Rouen 1711 as the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Le Prince and died in 1780. She lost her mother Marie-Barbe Plantart when she was only eleven but wrote that she did not mourn her death. The family was very poor and several of her siblings had to be sent away for adoption. She wrote that her mother had suffered terribly at not being able to maintain contact with her children or to establish what had become of them. She therefore felt intuitively that her mother's death was a blessing.
From 1725 - 1735, she taught small children in Ernemont, about ten miles from Rouen. Subsequently, she obtained a prestigious position as a singing teacher to the children at the Court of the Duke of Lorraine, Stanislaw Leszczynski, at Luneville.
Her first marriage, in 1743, was disastrous and was annulled after two years. The Duke of Lorraine had personally paid her dowry, a huge sum, so that she could marry well, but her husband used the dowry to pay off his debts, then used the rest to buy a hotel. There, he held wild parties and entertained disreputable characters. After her husband contracted a communicable disease as a result of his lifestyle, she was able to obtain an annulment but she retained her husband's name.
In 1746, she left France to become a governess in London. She wrote Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales, and after a successful publishing career in England, remarried, bore many children, and left England to live the rest of her life in Savoy.
Her first work, the moralistic novel The Triumph of Truth (Le Triomphe de la verite), was published in 1748. She continued her literary career by publishing many schoolbooks. She then began to publish collections she called "magazines" of educational and moral stories and poems for children. She was one of the first to write fairy tales for children. She also wrote other works, based on traditional fairy tales.
Because of her relationship in London with the French spy Thomas Pichon (1700-1781), she is a character in a novel entitled Crossings, A Thomas Pichon Novel, by Canadian writer A. J. B. Johnston. However, in that fictional appearance the dates for her relationship with Pichon are not accurate.