Frozen was widely heralded for its focus on a sister relationship instead of a romantic one—the first Disney fairy tale retelling that was about a bond between sisters. But the movie was (extremely loosely) based on The Snow Queen—a fairy tale that doesn’t even have a sister in it.
My upcoming middle grade book, Thornwood, is told from the point of view of Sleeping Beauty’s little sister, and is going to kick off a series of retellings, called Sisters Ever After, about “the sisters the fairy tales left out.” I had a lot of fun weaving the complexities of a sister relationship into a story that was originally about an only child. But at some point I started to wonder: why does a fairy tale about sisters seem like such a novel concept? After all, most fairy tales didn’t originate at a time when only children were the norm. Yet a search through popular fairy tales reveals a smattering of sister-brother combinations, and a couple of jealous, conniving sisters, but not many sisters who work together.
So I set out to find fairy tales and fairy-tale retellings that have good sister relationships at their core.
Fairy Tales About Loving Sisters
Snow White & Rose Red is the quintessential fairy tale that is, in its essence, about sisters who love and help each other. And it does, in fact, have a number of retellings that keep this sisterly relationship intact: Snow White and Rose Red by Patricia C. Wrede, Snow & Rose by Emily Winfield Martin, and most recently, Blanca & Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore, which combines this story with that of the Seven Swans but keeps its focus on the relationship between its two Latina sisters.
The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti is another great example of a story in which sisters save each other. In fact, it ends with the main characters, years later, telling their children the story and leaving no room for doubt about its moral:
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather…”
The Goblin Market shows up as scenery or side-plot in a number of fantasy novel—The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan springs to mind—and was recently made the center of a popular, critically-acclaimed retelling: Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner, which moves the story to an Eastern European Jewish shtetl.
Twelve Dancing Princesses has sisters in abundance: not just a pair, but twelve of them. My friend Diana Peterfreund described it as “every fairy-tale-loving writer’s favorite fairy tale” (note: guilty as charged), so it’s no surprise that this has been retold numerous times in many different ways. Most of the retellings are faithful to the core of the story while surrounding it with a rich world and complex relationships—i.e. Jessica Day George’s Princess of the Midnight Ball, Juliet Marillier’s Wildwood Dancing, and Heather Dixon’s Entwined. But the story also lends itself to a variety of twists, as exhibited in the horror-tinged House of Salt & Sorrows by Erin A. Craig or the Roaring-Twenties version in The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine.
In many versions of Bluebeard, the wife’s sisters come to save her (or rather, bring their husbands to save her). There is also an Italian version of this story, called How the Devil Married Three Sisters, in which the sisters probably had a great relationship before the first two were murdered. But the modern retellings of this fairy tale mostly leave the sisters out—these days, after all, we want our heroines to save themselves.
There are also other, lesser-known fairy tales that feature helpful sisters. The Red King from Northern India, was brought to my attention by a blog post lamenting the lack of sisters in European fairy tales. Molly Whupple is a Hansel & Gretel variant in which there are three sisters instead of a brother and a sister. And then there’s Kate Crackernuts, a Scottish tale that involves a girl’s head being turned into a sheep’s head. The only practical result of this transformation seems to be embarrassment for the girl in question. Luckily her stepsister saves her, while also curing a prince along the way and scoring them both royal husbands.
Bad Sisters Flipped Into Good Ones
Some of the more well-known fairy tales feature sisters who don’t—to put it mildly—get along. These fairy tales tend to delve into the pitted-against-each-other, seething-with-jealousy, trying-to-(literally)-kill-each-other variety of sibling rivalry.
But even these stories can be retold in a way that make them about deeper, better relationships between siblings.
Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters are, of course, the quintessential bad sisters. But when this tale is flipped and the stepsisters are the main characters, the relationship between the two of them might be one you want to root for. Prime examples: Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire. Interestingly, both these books end up bringing all three sisters together in a complex but ultimately supportive relationship. (In the second book in the Sisters Ever After series, I’m going to give Cinderella a third stepsister, to give those relationships a new twist.)
In Beauty and the Beast—or at least in some versions of it—Beauty’s sisters conspire to keep her from returning to the Beast, almost leading to his death. In the Disney version, the sisters are written out of the story altogether. But in several retellings, the sisters are transformed into close friends who ultimately support Beauty and each other. Two of the most gorgeous of these retellings were written by the same person—Robin McKinley, author of Beauty and Rose Daughter.
Sisters Added
Frozen and Thornwood are not the only retellings to add sisters to a fairy tale that never had one in the original. Two other examples are Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce (which basically splits Little Red Riding Hood into two girls), and The Woodcutter Sisters books by Alethea Kontis, which mashes up a number of fairy tales and assigns each sister an adventure of her own.
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You’ll notice one fairy tale that doesn’t appear on this list: Sleeping Beauty, which is the story I chose to retell in Thornwood. That story struck me as particularly ripe for this sort of retelling, because of its singular focus on Sleeping Beauty alone… despite the fact that the entire castle was put to sleep when she was. How did those people feel about being caught in the curse? What was Sleeping Beauty’s relationship to them? By giving Sleeping Beauty a little sister, I was able to both keep my retelling tied to the power of the original, but also expand it so that it’s not only about Sleeping Beauty and her prince. Turns out, when you add a sister to a story, you add a whole new dimension to it.
Fairy tale retellings have been popular for a long time, which means there must be many other examples I’ve missed. I’m hoping to hear about more fairy tale sisters in the comments! And if anyone has any theories about why there aren’t more of them, I’d love to hear those too.
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Thornwood
Leah Cypess is the author of four YA novels: Mistwood, Nightspell, Death Sworn, and Death Marked. Both Mistwood and Death Sworn were on the Kirkus Best Books for Teens list, and Death Sworn was a Teen Vogue “Most Exciting YA Book” of the year. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Thornwoood is her middle grade debut. Visit her online at her website or follow her on Twitter @LeahCypess.
I clicked on this specifically to see if Kate Crackernuts was mentioned, so thanks for that. I love how it’s not only a positive sister relationship but a positive stepsister relationship, which seems doubly rare in fairy tales. In most other tales Kate would have been the antagonist since IIRC it was her biological mom who was the evil stepmother who cursed Anne for being prettier than her own daughter.
And more an example of brother-sister relationships, but it always amused me in The Death of Koshchei the Deathless how the hero’s ass was saved by the fact that he had three sisters who all married birds.
Well written. It is such a shame that there are no recordings of Radio 4 “Whatever happened to – the ugly sisters”. Presented as a documentary in interview style the ugliness sisters tell their version if Cinderella and how their careers web afterwards
I love the Twelve dancing princesses. Pity the retellings are all about the soldier. There’s something fascinating in a bevy of sisters sharing a secret. A bad secret or a good one depends on the retelling.
The version of Kate Crackernuts I read had the sisters called the Queen’s Kate and the King’s Kate. The Queen’s Kate loves her sister and is determined to find a cure for her sheep’s head problem. Apparently asking mum to lift the spell wasn’t an alternative.
The older I’ve gotten, the better my relationship with my sister. Toxic female relationships as the norm seem to come from people who don’t like women in the first place. Good luck with your novel. We need more positive female relationships in fiction.
My childhood storybooks had two different retellings of ‘Kate Crackernuts’, so the story was essentially my accidental introduction to comparative literature. (I think this was true of two other stories as well, but they didn’t catch my attention to the same degree.) One of the versions, by Alison Lurie, calls the girls Kate and Ann (Wikipedia just informed me that this was a choice made by folklore collector Joseph Jacobs in the 1880s in order to make them easier to distinguish); the other, by Jane Ray, preserves the fun oddity of them having the same name and refers to them as Queen’s Kate and King’s Kate, as in @3. Ray’s book of international fairy tales includes a tiny, tantalising bit of commentary at the end; I recall her mentioning that Scottish stories are much more likely than other European fairy-tale traditions to include supportive, warm sister/stepsister relationships. This is something I found both interesting and memorable, because my extended family is full of close pairs of sisters and stepsisters, and the hackneyed idea of cruel/jealous/distant ones always seemed pretty ridiculous to me. (I loved Frozen, obviously, and I liked the sequel too.)
I thought of Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre, too, but I have to admit I haven’t read it.
(Edit: sorry, post needed another quick proofread.)
Folk and fairytales reflect the realities and anxieties of an era in which parental death was common and blended families’ relationships complicated by issues of inheritance and limited resources. Of course the majority of stepparents behaved decently, even affectionately towards their stepchildren but everybody must have known of cases where stepchildren were mistreated or done out of their inheritance and worried about what could happen.
It’s not exactly a fairytale, but in Kate Elliott’s _Spiritwalker_ series, the PoV character is an orphan being raised by her aunt and uncle, so she has a very sister-like relationship with her cousin. They are sometimes separated by events, but are always glad to reunite.
Most of the main characters in Theodora Goss’s _Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter_ series aren’t actually blood related, but they are a found sisterhood.
Kate Crackernuts has been mentioned several times; the best and probably most complex and satisfying version is the one by Katherine Briggs, deeply rooted in the Scottish setting, physically and culturally.
In Ever After, the 1998 Cinderella adaptation set in Renaissance France that starred Drew Barrymore, the younger stepsister, played by Melanie Lynskey, is not only sympathetic to Cinderella’s plight but by the end of the film is an ally and co-conspirator in resolving her situation.
I think it would be fair to include Frozen in the Snow White and Rose Red retellings. While it was partially based on The Snow Queen, the sisterly bond is definitely heavy influenced by that story as well. I feel their hair colors are a not-so-subtle nod to that story as well.
Kate Crackernuts is possibly a sibling to Tatterhood, whose sister’s head is also swapped. Tatterhood gets extra points from me for riding a goat and smacking rowdy trolls with a wooden spoon.
I go back and forth on whether to read Laura and Lizzie in “Goblin Market,” as actually sisters, or engaged in some less familial relationship. “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices,” and all that, y’know.
Love this list, it’s always fun to have a good sister bond in your stories.
I’m reminded of a book I saw but never actually read called the Wide-Awake Princess by E.D. Baker. It’s about Sleeping Beauty’s sister who is immune to magic and so stays awake throughout the whole thing. It’s more aimed at kids as I recall but is a really fun idea.
It’s not exactly a fairy tale (although it does have something like fairies) but Summers at Castle Auburn has one of my favorite sisterly relationships (well, half sisters) between two sisters who in a lot of other books/tropes would be bitter rivals or jealous (a noble and her bastard half sister) but love each other fully and completely.
I haven’t seen them but I think in one of the DTV sequels of Cinderella one of the stepsisters gets a more sympathetic characterization.
Side characters who are sisters seem to fair a bit better. The title characters in The Three Spinners show up to help a young woman whose new in-laws think she loves spinning when she actually can’t stand it. They get along and are willing to help a stranger.
There are the Gray sisters in Greek mythology. They only have one eyeball and one tooth but manage to take turns sharing it without getting into fights.
Then, there are the Gorgons. You take on one Gorgon, you take on them all, as Perseus found out when he had to exit quickly, pursued by siblings.
In fairy tale adaptations, I like Gilded Ashes by Rosamund Hodge. Cinderella, in this story, is haunted by her mother’s ghost, who does horrible things to anyone who makes her daughter unhappy. The result is that heroine, Maia, acts happy all the time, no matter what happens. She’s also scheming to get her stepsisters happily married so their survival is no longer linked to whether or not Maia can keep smiling.
never finished the series but the middle grade Sisters Grimm series was my favorite for a really long time, just bc i also had an annoying little sister who i had to take everywhere. but it is a fun series and both the girls work together and help each other often, in what felt like a really relatable sense (at least as a kid reading them! idk abt now lol)