Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont was born in Rouen 1711 and died in 1780. She lost her mother when she was only eleven but wrote that she did not mourn her death. The family was very poor and several of her siblings had to be sent away for adoption. She wrote that her mother had suffered terribly at not being able to maintain contact with her children or to establish what had become of them. She therefore felt intuitively that her mother's death was a blessing... Writing the story: Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, wrote a story titled Beauty and the Beast. Leprince de Beaumont revised and abridged this story considerably, in the form in which it is most commonly known and always included the revised version in the many "magazines" she published over the next 30 years. The success of this shorter revised version is the reason Leprince de Beaumont is commonly deemed the author of the classic story... *** Beauty and the Beast: There was once a very rich merchant, who had six children, three sons, and three daughters; being a man of sense, he spared no cost for their education, but gave them all kinds of masters. His daughters were extremely handsome, especially the youngest; when she was little, every body admired her, and called her The little Beauty so that, as she grew up, she still went by the name of Beauty which made her sisters very jealous...