Cinderilla : "Or, the Little Glass Slipper"

Cinderella, or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale embodying a myth-element of unjust oppression/triumphant reward. Thousands of variants are known throughout the world. The title character is a young woman living in unfortunate circumstances, that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune. The oldest documented version comes from China, and the oldest European version from Italy. The most popular version was first published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697, and later by the Brothers Grimm in their folk tale collection Grimms' Fairy Tales.

Although the story's title and main character's name change in different languages, in English-language folklore "Cinderella" is the archetypal name. The word "Cinderella" has, by analogy, come to mean one whose attributes were unrecognized, or one who unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect. The still-popular story of "Cinderella" continues to influence popular culture internationally, lending plot elements, allusions, and tropes to a wide variety of media.

ONCE there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. She had, by a former husband, two daughters of her own humour and they were indeed exactly like her in all things. He had likewise, by another wife, a young daughter, but of unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world.

No sooner were the ceremonies of the wedding over, but the stepmother began to shew herself in her colours. She could not bear the good qualities of this pretty girl; and the less, because they made her own daughters appear the more odious.

She employed her in the meanest work of the house; she scoured the dishes, tables, &c. and rubbed Madam's chamber, and those of Misses, her daughters; she lay up in a sorry garret, upon a wretched straw-bed, while her sisters lay in fine rooms, with floors all inlaid, upon beds of the very newest fashion, and where they had looking-glasses so large, that they might see themselves at their full length, from head to foot.


  1. 200 Meisterwerke der Literaturgeschichte : Die größten Klassiker der Weltliteratur

    Franz Kafka, Victor Hugo, Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski, Lord Byron, Giacomo Leopardi, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, Henry Fielding, George Eliot, William Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Carrol, Edgar Allan Poe, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Daniel Defoe, James Fenimore Cooper, Lew Wallace, Jonathan Swift, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Laurence Sterne, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Wallace, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, John Galsworthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, Washington Irvin, O.Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Alexander Sergejewitsch Puschkin, Michail Lermontow, Iwan Sergejewitsch Turgenew, Leo Tolstoi, Nikolai Gogol, Iwan Gontscharow, Nikolai Leskow, Anton Pawlowitsch Tschechow, Maxim Gorki, François Rabelais, Jean de la Fontaine, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Corneille, Moliere, Jean Baptiste Racine, Charles Perrault, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre Ambroise de Laclos, Antoine-François Prévost, Marquis De Sade, François René Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Guy De Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Jules Verne, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Prosper Mérimée, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, André Gide, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jacob Grimm, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, E. T. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, Theodor Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, Stefan Zweig, Joseph von Eichendorff, Klaus Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johanna Spyri, Joseph Roth, Karl May, Robert Musil, Heinrich Mann, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Giacomo Casanova, Luigi Pirandello, Giosuè Carducci, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Niccolo Machiavelli, Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Vicente Blasco Ibañez, Knut Hamsun, Homer, Äsop, Herodot, Thukydides, Xenophon, Platon, - Aristoteles, - Sophokles, Euripides, - Aristophanes, Lao Tse, - Konfuzius, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Lukian, Petronius, Apuleius, Longos von Lesbos, Mark Aurel, Aurelius Augustinus

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  2. Märchen für kleine Mädchen I

    Hans Christian Andersen, Giambattista Basile, Ludwig Bechstein, Märchen aus 1001 Nacht, Novalis, Charles Perrault

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  3. The Most Beloved Bedtime Stories For Kids

    Melanie Rose, Aesop, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Richard Johnson, The Brothers Grimm

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  4. Charles Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose

    Charles Perrault

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  5. The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

    Charles Perrault

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  6. Donkey-Skin (Story Time, Episode 199)

    Charles Perrault

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  7. The Ridiculous Wishes (Story Time, Episode 198)

    Charles Perrault

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  8. Little Thumb (Story Time, Episode 197)

    Charles Perrault

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  9. Riquet with the Tuft (Story Time, Episode 196)

    Charles Perrault

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  10. Cinderilla or The Little Glass Slipper (Story Time, Episode 195)

    Charles Perrault

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  11. The Master Cat or Puss in Boots (Story Time, Episode 194)

    Charles Perrault

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  12. The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (Story Time, Episode 193)

    Charles Perrault

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