In the tradition of Wicked”s filling-out of The Wizard of Oz, this week we bring you While Beauty Slept, Elizabeth Blackwell’s well-imagined  treatment on Sleeping Beauty.

The heroine is Elise, a poor farm girl whose father has a special reason to despise and mistreat her. As the farm’s fortunes descend to worse than bad, Elise finds the means to travel to the castle and offer herself as a servant there.

(”Where is this? When is this?” my husband asked as I read pages and pages to him while we traveled. “Why, no one knows,” I told him. “It’s a fairy tale, silly.”)

Anyway, Elise rises through the ranks, at a speed that would only make sense in a fairy tale. But how else can Blackwell insert Elise into the action? She’s got to be close enough to the king and queen, the army of courtiers and the crazy aunt in the North Tower, close enough to tell us what really happened there.

And what happened is:

The queen did not produce an heir. So she made a devil’s bargain, and while you probably already know that it worked, you’d want to read Blackwell’s book to get all the details.

The story rolled along, full of cads and serving maids and comical townspeople and catty ladies-in-waiting, and even a young man that catches Elise’s eye.

Somewhere beyond the halfway point, it took on a forced feel, stuffed with items from someone’s plot-device grab-bag. This includes a romance, its love scenes peppered with the purplest euphemisms. Thank goodness we were done with our trip by then; if I’d had to read them aloud, I would have rolled my eyes out of my head.

But Blackwell recovered in her last pages, pulling off an excellent twist.

Photo credit: Justin in SD on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA