Romance Retellings: Beauties and Beasts

Bookish women of a certain age likely have a special place in their heart for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Okay, maybe not all of us, but there is definitely a good amount of women who came of age with Belle, a new kind of Disney heroine in the early 1990s: she didn’t care about the dumb jock, whether he was pretty or not; she just wanted to read. And read. And read some more. And maybe have some adventures. We were here for it.  

Or maybe a bookish or non bookish person of a similar or different age has connection to a different Beauty and a different Beast: Catherine and Vincent, or La Belle et Le Bete. But we can say that when it comes to that kind of story, we want more and more of the same. The story is one that continues to be told, whether it’s a retelling of the original Perrault fairy tale, or a reinvisioning of the Disney story with a twist, like the most recent As Old As Time, which asks “what if Belle’s mother cursed the Beast”?

But there’s one genre of writing that just can’t walk away from the trope of the beautiful woman (or man, or other) who somehow influences both the internal and external beauty of the person who loves them: Romance. And I’ve got a few favorites for you (though there are literally hundreds of romance novels that feature different twists on the familiar trope).