Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was published by ReganBooks/HarperCollins in 1999, and it applies the same revisionist strategy Maguire used in Wicked to the Cinderella story — retelling a familiar fairy tale from the perspective of its supposed villain, transforming a simple moral fable into a complex human narrative.
The novel is set in Haarlem during the Dutch Golden Age, and the “Cinderella” figure is Clara, a beautiful girl whose beauty is both her fortune and her prison. Her “ugly stepsisters” are Iris and Ruth — refugees from England who arrive in Holland with their desperate mother and are taken into Clara’s household. Iris, the narrator, is plain but intelligent; Ruth is possibly mentally disabled but possesses a strange intuitive wisdom. Neither is “ugly” in the fairy-tale sense of being evil; they are simply ordinary women living alongside an extraordinary beauty.
Maguire weaves the fairy-tale elements (the ball, the transformation, the glass slipper) into the historical setting with considerable ingenuity: the tulip mania provides the economic backdrop, the Dutch master painters provide the aesthetic framework, and the Calvinist culture provides the moral atmosphere. The novel’s argument is that “beauty” and “ugliness” are social constructions — categories imposed by stories that serve particular interests — and that the real Cinderella story is more complicated, more human, and more interesting than the fairy-tale version.
Collecting Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
First edition (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, New York, 1999): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$60
- Without jacket: $5–$15