Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Born (1711-04-26)26 April 1711
Rouen, France
Died 8 September 1780(1780-09-08) (aged 69)
Savoy, France
Occupation Novelist

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (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).

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. After that she and her younger sister were mentored by two wealthy women who entered them into the convent school at Ernemont in Rouen. They were educated and then taught there from 1725 to 1735.[1]

Subsequently, she obtained a prestigious position as a singing teacher to the children at the Court of the Duke of Lorraine, Stanisław Leszczyński, at Lunéville.[2]

Her first marriage was in 1737 to the dancer Antoine Malter. Details of a second marriage to Grimard de Beaumont are unclear. However, we know that she bore a daughter, Elisabeth by Beaumont.

In 1748, she left France to become a governess in London.[3] She wrote several fairy tales, among them Beauty and the Beast, and after a successful publishing career in England, she left that country in 1763 with her daughter Elisabeth and son-in-law Moreau. She lived first in Savoy, near the city of Annecy, then moved to Avallon near Dijon in 1774 (see her personal letter #21 dated 22 December 1774 to Thomas Tyrrell).

Her first work, the moralistic novel The Triumph of Truth (Le Triomphe de la vérité), was published in 1748. She published approximately seventy volumes during her literary career Most famous were the collections she called "magasins," instructional handbooks for parents and educators of students from childhood through adolescence. She was one of the first to include folk tales as moralist and educational tools in her writings.

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.[4]

Works

Fairy tales

References

  1. ↑ Le Prince de Beaumont, Marie. Éducation complète ou Abrégé de l'histoire universelle. London: J. Nourse, 1753. 7.
  2. ↑ Letter from the second chaplain of King Stanislas to his nephew, a student at the University of Pont-à-Mousson, in the summer of 1743, in Mme. Leprince de Beaumont, 171Jeanne was a wonderful, bi, author1-1780, p.127, by A. Reynaud
  3. ↑ Sonya Stephens (2000). A history of women's writing in France. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58844-7.
  4. ↑
    • Johnston, A.J.B. (2015). Crossings, A Thomas Pichon Novel. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press. ISBN 978-1-77206-020-1. EPUB 978-1-77206-022-5, Kindle 978-1-77206-023-2, Web pdf 978-1-77206-021-8

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