Rachel Hockhauser, author of 'Lady Tremaine,' spins an "untelling" of the villainized stepmother in her new novel
Credit: Disney+; St. Martin’s Press
NEED TO KNOW
- Lady Tremaine author Rachel Hockhauser’s new book advocates for another look at the villainized stepmother in Cinderella’s story
- Hockhauser’s new novel follows Lady Tremaine — not how she’s been known for centuries, but as a single mother who’s hanging on by a thread trying to support her family
- “If you really think about the evil stepmother, she’s been widowed twice over. She’s had a lot of loss in her life,” Hockhauser said
Rachel Hockhauser, author of Lady Tremaine, is standing up for the villainized stepmother of Cinderella.
On a recent episode of Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, Hockhauser advocated for her "untelling" of the stepmother long portrayed as evil in Cinderella's story. Her novel, which debuted on March 3, reframes Lady Etheldreda Tremaine as a single mother who's desperate to preserve the remaining respect on her family's name.
Speaking with host Danielle Robay, Hockhauser said at the heart of Lady Tremaine is the complexity that modern readers love in female characters, but which has somehow never been extended to the Cinderella character. In the original fairytale, the stepmother is portrayed as cold, self-serving and wicked, but Hockhauser recognized and uplifted a different version of the character.
"I just I had a really clear picture of her her voice, this house she was living in that she had stripped, sold her belongings and her jewels so that she could keep running her household," Hockhauser said.
Credit: Disney+
Another crucial aspect of the age-old tale is marriage, and how central it is to the plot. Like many, the author grew up more drawn to Cinderella's happily-ever-after with her prince. But as she grew older, especially when she became a mother, Hockhauser realized by continuing to amplify Cinderella's story as it has always been told, "that [marriage] is the only happily-ever-after that is available to little girls."
Furthermore, though possibly inadvertently, Cinderella positions marriage as "the finish line," whereas Hockhauser discovered upon her own marriage that it's truly a beginning.
"All the confluence of all these things made me feel like, let's do a new version of the fairy tale, the one that I wish I had had and one that I'm really happy to give to my daughters," she said.
In Lady Tremaine, Hockhauser sought to "create a happy ending that was more inclusive of different types of outcomes for people," she said.
As for championing the character constantly positioned as the villain, Hockhauser found she identified more with Lady Tremaine once she became a mother. She actually wrote her novel when she was essentially raising her kids on her own — her husband, who has since recovered, became gravely ill in 2023 — and at the time, as Robay described, Hockhauser was writing about a woman shouldering all weight at all costs, "fighting for survival."
Credit: St. Martin’s Press
That difficult time in her life helped her connect with the level of grief and exhaustion Lady Tremaine must have experienced, she said.
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"If you really think about the evil stepmother, she's been widowed twice over. She's had a lot of loss in her life," Hockhauser said. "And so it made it easy to to put myself in her shoes and and think about what it feels like when your life looks so different than what you had signed up for."
Lady Tremaine is available now, wherever books are sold.
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