In most places and for most of history, folk tales have not been written down. They have instead been passed from story teller to story teller down through the generations, changing over time as the current teller of the tale adds or changes a detail.

In the book Clever Maids, the author Valerie Paradiz tells the true history of the women who collected the stories that were edited and published by the Brothers Grimm. Folk tales, she tells us, were women’s stories—the tales that women told over the laundry or the baking, or entertained children with during a long winter’s evening, or when putting them to bed. They were servant’s stories—the stories of the folk, the ordinary people.

We can see these origins in the stories themselves. In folk tales, if not in the high literature of the cultures of the world, the weak and helpless win out over the malice of the powerful. Notably, many of the protagonists of folk tale are women—women who are essential to the story, which isn’t over until they get their happy ending.

Today, romance literature is predominately a women’s literature: written predominantly for women and by women, and not over until the female protagonist gets her happy ending. It seemed to me that romance was the right place to retell folk tales, and A Twist Upon a Regency Tale is the result.