Belle of the ball

The story Beauty and the Beast is an all-time favourite. So much so, this story has been adapted to movies and musicals.

This fairy tale titled La Belle et la Bête was written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. It was published in 1740 in La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins (The Young American and Marine Tales). Seeing the popularity of the tale it was abridged, rewritten and published by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756 in . Later, in 1889, Andrew Lang produced it in The Blue Fairy Book. The story of Beauty and the Beast was influenced not only by Greek mythology (Cupid and Psyche) but also by the Italian fairy tale The Facetious Nights of Straparola. Today, you find variations of this story all across Europe. In 2017, this popular fairy tale was made into a musical romantic fantasy film. It was a live-action adaptation of Disney’s 1991 animated film of the same name.