Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780) was a French writer and educator. Born in Rouen, she left an unhappy marriage and in 1748 went to England, where she worked for about fifteen years as a governess in aristocratic households and wrote for the education of her pupils. Her Magasin des enfants of 1756, a series of dialogues between a governess and her young charges that mixes lessons with stories, contains her version of Beauty and the Beast, condensed from a much longer tale by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve and now the standard form of the story. She published some seventy volumes of moral and educational writing before retiring to Savoy.