Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
| Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
26 April 1711 Rouen, France |
| Died | 8 September 1780 (aged 69) Savoy, France |
| Occupation | Novelist |
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont 
pronunciation (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 British spy Thomas Pichon (1757–1760).
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.
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.
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. 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.
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