Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy

Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy was a French writer of novels, memoirs and fairy tales, and one of the women who made the fairy tale a fashion in Paris in the 1690s. She died in Paris in 1705. The White Cat comes from her second collection of tales, Contes nouveaux ou Les Fées à la mode, published in 1698.

She was born Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville in Barneville-la-Bertran, in Normandy, into a family of minor nobility. The year is uncertain: older books give 1650 or 1651, and recent archival work points to 1652. In 1666, in her early teens, she was married to François de La Motte, Baron d’Aulnoy, a much older man. Three years later he was arrested on a charge of treason. The men who had accused him were executed for false accusation, and she, suspected of a part in the plot, left Paris. How far she was involved is still debated, and so is where she spent the years that followed. She later wrote about the Spanish court and a journey through Spain, but scholars disagree on whether she made that journey herself.

By 1690 she was back in Paris, where she held a literary salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. That year she published Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Douglas, a novel with a fairy tale set inside it, L’Île de la Félicité, often counted as the first literary fairy tale printed in France. Les Contes des fées followed in 1697, in four volumes, the same year as Charles Perrault’s tales, and the Contes nouveaux a year later. The Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua made her a member under the name of Clio, the muse of history.