The book won a Newbery Honor in 1998.[1] In 2006, Levine went on to write Fairest, a retelling of the story of Snow White, set in the same world as Ella Enchanted. In 2018, Levine published Ogre Enchanted, a prequel to Ella Enchanted.
On April 9, 2004, a movie that is loosely based on the novel was released. It was directed by Tommy O'Haver and starred Anne Hathaway and Hugh Dancy as Ella and Prince Charmont, respectively. The film received mostly mixed reviews, and was heavily criticized for its changes to the source material and addition of new characters. Levine stated that the film is "so different from the book that it's hard to compare them" and suggested "regarding the movie as a separate creative act".[2]
When Ella was just a baby, the fairy Lucinda bestowed the gift of obedience on her. The "gift" is in fact a terrible curse, forcing Ella to obey anyone who gives her an order.
When Ella is around fourteen, her mother dies. Her cook Mandy reveals herself to be her Fairy godmother. She is given two gifts by Mandy: a necklace from her mother and a magic book. At her mother's funeral, Ella meets the kingdom's prince, Char, who comforts her. At the wake, she is introduced to Dame Olga and her terrible daughters, Hattie and illiterate Olive - but at the time, feels no special significance to this encounter.
Her father, Peter, decides to send her to finishing school with the two mean sisters. Before leaving she visits her favorite places, where she meets Char again and they bond. At school, Hattie eventually discovers that Ella does whatever she is told and uses this for her own gain. She takes Ella's mother's necklace, then deprives Ella of food and orders her to end her friendship with her best friend Areida. Ella cannot stand this and sets out to find Lucinda so that she can reverse the spell. In her magic book, she saw that her father is about to attend a giant's wedding and she assumes that Lucinda - who likes to come uninvited to weddings - might be there.
Ella comes upon the kingdom of Elves, who offer a warm welcome. The next morning, she awakens surrounded by ogres who plan on devouring her. She is given the command not to run away, so she is trapped, and stays up all night practicing Ogrese in hopes of using on the ogres their own weapon of hypnotic speech. It works and she talks them back to sleep, just in time for Char and his soldiers to apprehend them. One of his men is sent to escort Ella.
Ella learns that ungrateful recipients of Lucinda's gifts often end up as squirrels and decides to use an alias when talking to her. Ella tells her she desires more mettle for she is too obedient, but Lucinda tells Ella to be happy and Ella is forced to feel happy because of her 'gift.'
Ella learns from her father that he's lost everything so he must marry Dame Olga. At the wedding, Lucinda gifts the bride and groom eternal love. On the ride to Olga's house, Peter reveals that he's broke. Olga is livid, but due to Lucinda's gift, she is unable to stay angry at him. Instead she begins to transfer all of her hatred to Ella. Char comes to visit Ella but Hattie orders her to stay in her room. This continues until Char leaves for his trip. They start communicating via letters, which Ella has him address to Mandy so as not to arouse suspicion from her new step-family. When Peter leaves for work, Hattie reveals Ella's curse and Olga makes Ella work as a servant in the house.
After months of communicating with each other, Ella and Char fall in love and Char wishes for her to be his queen. Ella realizes her curse could be very dangerous for him since he will one day be king. She decides they could never be together and writes a letter addressed from Hattie to mislead him into thinking she has run off with a rich earl. Mandy calls upon Lucinda and confronts her about the disastrous consequences of her gifts. Lucinda disbelieves her, but Mandy convinces her to try it for herself, living for three months as a squirrel and three months being obedient.
During the next six months, Ella continues to endure the torment of her step-family. She learns that Char will be returning soon and three royal balls will be held. Lucinda returns disheveled and remorseful about all the suffering she has caused. Ella begs her to remove her curse, now that she knows how terrible it truly is, but Lucinda vows that she will no longer perform acts of big magic. Lucinda tells Ella she will have to find a way to do it herself.
When Prince Char returns from his travels, Ella goes to the balls in disguise, with the help of Mandy and Lucinda. At the first ball, she dances with Char, who still wants to be with Ella after a chance meeting with Areida made him question the letter he received. On the third night, he introduces her to his parents and dances only with her. Hattie is jealous and unmasks Ella, causing her to flee and lose one of her glass slippers. Char finds the slipper and goes to her home. He asks her to tell him if she loves him, which she does. He then tells her to marry him - which is an order which her curse compels her to obey.
After an internal struggle Ella bursts out with "No, I will not marry you! No one can force me!" after which she hugs and kisses Char. Her love and care for Char have broken Lucinda's spell. Now, Ella can explain everything to the confused Char, who again asks her to marry him - which she is now free and happy to accept.
Unlike in the original Cinderella story, Ella takes no revenge on her stepmother and stepsisters beyond not inviting them to the royal wedding. Char's royal parents warmly accept Ella in the family. Ella and Areida rekindle their friendship. Mandy becomes the castle cook and fairy godmother to Char and Ella's future children. Ella's first person narrative ends with her telling the reader that "So we still live in love and laughter".
Analysis and publication history
While all the familiar plot elements of the Cinderella story are still present in this retelling, they are given a different significance. In particular, in Levine's version Cinderella/Ella and the Prince have known each other all along and had already long since fallen in love before the balls, but are unable to realize their love until the end of the story. As noted by Levine, the plot element of Ella being cursed with obedience fills a logical flaw in the original Cinderella story, explaining why she had to obey her foster mother and sisters.[citation needed]
In 2012 it was ranked number 85 on a list of the top 100 children's novels published by School Library Journal.[4]
Related Research Articles
"Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances who is suddenly blessed by remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between 7 BC and AD 23, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.
"Beauty and the Beast" is a fairy-tale written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740 in La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins.
In fairy tales, a fairy godmother is a fairy with magical powers who acts as a mentor or parent to someone, in the role that an actual godparent was expected to play in many societies. In Perrault's "Cinderella", he concludes the tale with the moral that no personal advantages will suffice without proper connections.
Happily N'Ever After is a 2006 animated fantasy adventure comedy film directed by Paul J. Bolger, produced by John H. Williams, and written by Rob Moreland. It is inspired by fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and loosely based on the 1999 animated German television series Simsala Grimm. The title is the opposite of a stock phrase, happily ever after; the name is contracted with an apostrophe between the N and the E. The film stars the voices of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Andy Dick, Wallace Shawn, Patrick Warburton, George Carlin, and Sigourney Weaver. The film was one of Carlin's final works before his death.
Gail Carson Levine is an American author of young adult books. Her first novel, Ella Enchanted, received a Newbery Honor in 1998.
The Door in the Hedge is a collection of fairy tales by Robin McKinley, published by William Morrow and Company under its Greenwillow Books imprint in 1981. It includes two original stories and two retellings.
The Two Princesses of Bamarre is a 2001 novel by Gail Carson Levine, the author of Ella Enchanted and several other books. The story revolves around the lives of two sisters who are very close, but as different as night and day. When one of them falls victim to a deadly disease sweeping the kingdom, the other must find her inner strength and bravery to discover the cure, and save her elder sister.
Diamonds and Toads or Toads and Diamonds is a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault, and titled by him "Les Fées" or "The Fairies". Andrew Lang included it in The Blue Fairy Book. It was illustrated by Laura Valentine in Aunt Louisa's nursery favourite.
The Wish is a 2000 children's novel by Gail Carson Levine, the Newbery Honor winning author of Ella Enchanted. The novel tells the story of Wilma, who wishes to be the most popular girl at her school, Claverford, forgetting that she will graduate in three weeks and move to a new school.
Ella Enchanted is a 2004 jukebox musical fantasy comedy film directed by Tommy O'Haver and written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, loosely based on Gail Carson Levine's 1997 novel of the same name. Starring Anne Hathaway and Hugh Dancy, the film is a satire of the fairy tale genre.
Just Ella is a novel written by Margaret Peterson Haddix and published in 1999 by Simon & Schuster. The story is a retelling of Cinderella with a feminist twist and a different version of the happily-ever-after ending. The plot revolves around Ella, a beautiful girl struggling to find the true meaning of happiness. A companion novel, Palace of Mirrors, was released in 2008.
Fairest is a 2006 novel by Gail Carson Levine. It uses some plot elements of the classic Snow White and is set in the same world as Ella Enchanted. The kingdom of Ayortha, the setting of the story, is the neighboring kingdom of Kyrria, where Ella Enchanted was set and the story makes several allusions to the previous work.
Ash is a young adult fantasy children's novel by Malinda Lo first published in 2009. It is a reworking of the Cinderella fairy tale that reimagines the title character, Ash, as a lesbian teenager. The novel centers around the familiar story of Cinderella, her father recently remarried, and lamenting the misery of her new life with stepsisters and a stepmother. The twist arrives when Ash falls in love with the King's respected huntress Kaisa, after she has made a commitment to dark fairy prince Sidhean.
"The Price of Gold" is the fourth episode of the American fairy tale/drama television series Once Upon a Time. The series takes place in the fictional seaside town of Storybrooke, Maine, in which the residents are actually characters from various fairy tales that were transported to the "real world" town by a powerful curse. This episode centers on Emma Swan coming to the aid of a young pregnant woman named Ashley Boyd who is trying to escape from Storybrooke and Mr. Gold, which parallels with Cinderella's (Schram) regrettable deal she made with Rumpelstiltskin (Carlyle).
Aik Nayee Cinderella is a 2012 Pakistani drama serial broadcast on Geo TV every Saturday. The drama is based on the novel of the same name by Faiza Iftikhar and directed by Haissam Hussain, starring Maya Ali, Osman Khalid Butt and Faizan Khawaja. It was released on 13 October 2012 with the production of A & B Entertainment.
"The Fairy's Mistake" is the first story in a two volume set of six stories called The Princess Tales by Gail Carson Levine. Published in 1999, two years after her Newbery Honor winning novel Ella Enchanted, "The Fairy's Mistake" follows along the same lines by taking the well-known fairytale Diamonds and Toads and turning it on its head. The story focuses on identical twin sisters Rosella and Myrtle, whose respective rewards and punishments end up doing exactly the opposite of what was intended.
"The Other Shoe" is the third episode of the sixth season of the American fantasy drama series Once Upon a Time, which aired on October 9, 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
