Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance is the story of seven free-thinking salon writers of 17th-century France who wielded their pens as an act of protest and launched a sensation that swept across Europe long before the Brothers Grimm were even born. It was these women—conteuses, they called themselves—who coined the term “fairy tale.” The stories they wrote and published starred strong females on quests that mirrored the challenges the writers themselves faced under the patriarchy, specifically the misogynistic and homophobic reign of Louis XIV. Over the century-long spell that their tales were popular, however, forces would work to erase them, to cast them from the fairy tale canon in favor of male tellers. The headstrong princesses that had lived on the conteuses’ pages were replaced by the types we call classic: the obedient Cinderella, naive Snow White, silent Little Mermaid, and flat-out unconscious Sleeping Beauty. But now the salon sisters’ forgotten characters are awakened in revamped tellings of a dozen of the original tales. Revived, too, are the authors themselves, in deeply researched histories that are tributes to the spicy, oft-harrowing lives of these women who shaped one of our most beloved literary traditions.