December | 2022 | Australian Fairy Tale Society

Salonline is a new webseries telling the stories of our stories in a whole new way.

Watch the subversive fairy tale writer of the French Salons meet to discuss their scandalous lives and share their latest stories – and read the book, now available on Amazon and Apple Books.

The screen shows headshots of 3 women in elaborate wigs each speaking from salons featuring fine furnishings. On the top left is Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force smiling in a lime-shaded salon; on the top righ is Henriette-Julie de Castelnau du Murat looking mischievous in a pink-shaded salon, and on the bottom is Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy beaming from a blue-shaded salon.

Created between August 2021 and September 2022, this original webseries communicates the stories of the origins of the fairy tale genre in the French Fairy Tale Salons of the late 17th century through the fictionalised dramatic lives of the most significant Salonnières: D’Aulnoy, Murat, and De La Force, and their performances of fairy tales they wrote.

Catch up with both well-known and little-known fairy tales and behind-the-scenes gossip on the Salonline AFTS You Tube channel.

Meet our Salonnières –

Against the lime-tinted background of a richly furnished salon, two ornate gilded frames hang. On the left is a photograph of a woman resting her arms on antique furniture, and on the right is a seventeenth century portrait of a woman resting her hands on a harpsichord. The text reads Starring Alyssa Curtayne as Charlotte Rose Caumont de la Force.

Alyssa Curtayne – storyteller, Ring Leader of the Perth Fairy Tale Ring, and academic, currently researching Charlotte Rose Caumont De La Force for her Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Deakin University. Alyssa re-enacts De La Force’s romantic life and performs some of her stories – Green and Blue, Fairer Than a Fairy, The Good Woman, and most famously, Persinette, the story which became known as Rapunzel.

Against the pink-tinted background of a richly furnished salon, two ornate gilded frames hang. On the left is a photograph of a woman in a garden, and on the right is a seventeenth century portrait of a woman in a garden. The text reads Starring Jo Henwood as Henriette-Julie de Murat.

Jo Henwood – storyteller, tour guide, and President, Ring Maiden and co-founder of the Australian Fairy Tale Society, is a museum theatre creative, and workshop leader on literature, history, creative writing, folklore, and storytelling. As Henriette-Julie de Murat, most scandalous of the scandalous Salonnières, she performs The Savage, The Pig King, The Isle of Magnificence, and The Turbot, re-telling these stories, just as Murat retold stories she found in Straparola.

Eliane Morel – writer, actor, producer, and singer of cabaret and opera, continues to perform her award-winning show ‘Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales’ which plays with the character of Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, the Baroness d’Aulnoy, the leader of the fairy tale writers. Eliane performs some D’Aulnoy stories – The Ram, The White Cat (which you might know from the ballet of Sleeping Beauty), and Belle-Belle, which the AFTS explored in September 2020.

The Salonline webseries, edited by our website Guardian, Kathy Smart, is already available on YouTube for free viewing.

And very soon, an eBook full of biographies, timelines, essays, and the retellings of these forgotten fairy tales, illustrated with art by Debra Phillips and with graphic design by Devahuti Chahlia, will be for sale from this website.