In 1600s Paris, one woman undertook an act of rebellion. Her weapon was fairy tales.

Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy — who'd been married off at 15 to an abusive man three decades her elder — slipped messages of resistance into her popular stories, risking jail in the process.

D'Aulnoy lived in a punishing patriarchy: women couldn't work or inherit money, and were forbidden from marrying for love.

Through her work, she showed an alternative.

"She subversively wrote against some of the cultural norms for women at the time," says Melissa Ashley, whose book The Bee and the Orange Tree is a fictionalised account of d'Aulnoy's life.

"She was incredible."

The characters created by Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy are, in a word, tough. ( Getty: Photo 12 )

Going against the grain to write strong women

D'Aulnoy was born in 1650 and grew up to work in the "golden age of fairy tale writing".

She even coined the term 'fairy tale' — 'conte de fée'.

"We have this idea that fairy tales came from the Grimm Brothers in the 19th century and Hans Christian Andersen," Ashley says.

But Ashley says it was d'Aulnoy who wrote "the very first fairy tale" — The Isle of Happiness.

It tells the story of a prince who travels to an enchanted island and meets Princess Felicity, who's never seen a human. She entertains the prince with operas and lavish art, and before he knows it he's been on the island for 300 years.

It was published in 1690 — seven years before fairy tales took off with the publication of Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault, who also wrote Sleeping Beauty, the Little Glass Slipper and Puss in Boots.

Brisbane-based Melissa Ashley has written a fictionalised account of the life of Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy. ( Supplied )

Ashley says the women in d'Aulnoy's stories were the opposite of the "very submissive female characters" in the works of other writers.

"In Marie-Catherine's fairy tales the women were completely different. They were independent," she says.

"She explored real love and women's agency, and women being resourceful and canny and intelligent, making changes in their lives."

They resisted arranged marriage, for example.

"Women were often married off as young as 15 to men who were several decades older than they were," says Ashley, of 17th century France.

"You could actually be imprisoned for marrying someone you loved.

"You were a [legal] minor, and your parents had control of you, until you were 25. Then you became the property of your husband.

"You couldn't work. You couldn't inherit money. Your husband had control over your money."

How she got away with it

D'Aulnoy's female protagonists, like this one from her story Belle Belle, challenge restrictive societal norms. ( Supplied )

D'Aulnoy's work — 26 original fairy tales in all — was a brave undertaking.

"There was a royal censor at the time and you couldn't directly criticise the regime; you'd be thrown into prison for that," Ashley says.

"So she had coded ways of critiquing women's lives in her fairy tales."

She says d'Aulnoy's subversive messages were disguised by the richness of her "very, very detailed" writing.

Sorry, this audio has expired The woman behind the first fairy tale

Her stories often had a "quest narrative", in which a heroine overcomes complicated trials, in order to marry her true love.

The whimsy of the fantasy, and the magical worlds of her stories, may have allowed her "to get away with having subversive messages about the state packed inside", Ashley says.

They were messages suggesting that a happy ending required something different from the readers' reality.

"Fighting against arranged marriage was a real theme of hers," Ashley says.

"The feminine characters choose their own love, as opposed to accepting [arranged marriage], which was the norm at the time."

D'Aulnoy's story The Bee and the Orange Tree, which Ashley's book is named after, is a good example of how her female characters are anything but passive.

The heroine, Aimée, is separated from her family as a baby and sails in a boat of ogres to an island where she's brought up as a "wild girl".

Aimée is, in a word, tough.

"She's a bit like Artemis the goddess," Ashley says.

"She uses arrows and she wore a cloak, which was tiger skin."

To outsmart the ogres, who threaten to eat her if she doesn't behave, she uses "all sorts of very canny, inventive" methods.

Later, Aimée rescues a prince in need of saving, and uses medicine she's foraged from the forest to cure him of his ailments.

"Then she protects him from being eaten by the ogres," Ashley says.

"She's just constantly solving problems and being a very resourceful female character."

'Prince Charming' prototype offered hope

D'Aulnoy also wrote about the idea of a "romantic inclination" — a model that posed an alternative to the one she lived under.

"As opposed to marrying someone who might be 45, a gambler, a rake, a ruffian and who didn't really care very much for you, [she was] exploring the values of conversation, wit ... of making a choice about who your beloved is," Ashley says.

"That was the Prince Charming that she explored."

It might sound simple, like the stuff of a blockbuster film.

But at a time when true love was effectively outlawed, and so too was speaking against a system that controlled your relationship, it was a powerful message.

Decades after her death in 1705, d'Aulnoy became discredited, criticised by even the likes of the Grimm Brothers.

They claimed "the typical things that people say about women's writing, which is that it's sentimental, it's domestic, it's concerned with ... inferiority," Ashley says.

"She was criticised for the 'femaleness' of her writing by the Grimm Brothers, and people just believed that and forgot about her."

In her lifetime, though, d'Aulnoy never stopped trying to make change through her writing.

"She spent the rest of her literary life exploring women trying to have more agency in their relationship, in their marriages," Ashley says.

"She's a fascinating person."