Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper
by Marcia Brown
Summary
Marcia Brown translates and illustrates Charles Perrault's version of the Cinderella story, keeping its familiar shape intact: a girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters is given a coach, a gown and glass slippers by her fairy godmother for one night at the prince's ball, on the condition that the magic ends at midnight, and after fleeing the ball and losing one slipper on the palace steps, she is identified as its true owner when the prince's search finally reaches her stepmother's house. Brown keeps Perrault's own details, including the pumpkin coach, the mice turned footmen, and the stepsisters' unsuccessful attempts to force the slipper onto their own feet, rather than smoothing the story into a more generic fairy tale.
Her illustrations, done in soft blues, pinks and golds, favor an airy, delicate elegance over hard outline, giving the French court a lightness that suits Perrault's own tone, which is drier and more knowing than the story's later, more sentimental adaptations. Kirkus Reviews later judged it the far superior picture book edition of Perrault's tale, praising Brown's delicate and romantic illustrations, a fair description of how closely the words and images work together here.
It reads well aloud in a single sitting, familiar enough that very young children can predict the plot's turns while still enjoying Brown's specific visual take on a story most of them already know in outline from other sources. Brown had already been a Caldecott runner up six times over the previous seven years, and Cinderella shows the same close attention to a source text's actual language that marked her other folk tale retellings across that run.
Historical Context & Significance
Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper won the 1955 Caldecott Medal for a book Charles Scribner's Sons published in 1954. That year's runners up were Marguerite de Angeli's Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes, Tibor Gergely's Wheel on the Chimney and Helen Sewell's The Thanksgiving Story.
This was the first of three Caldecott Medals Brown would win across her career, a record for the most medals won by a single illustrator, since equaled only by David Wiesner. By 1955 she had already been a runner up six times in seven years, for Stone Soup in 1948, Henry Fisherman in 1950, Dick Whittington and His Cat in 1951, Skipper John's Cook in 1952, Puss in Boots in 1953 and The Steadfast Tin Soldier in 1954, before Cinderella finally won her the medal outright. She worked across a wide range of styles over her long career, from the flat, woodcut inspired look of some of her folk tale retellings to the loose, airy, delicate work she used here, and Cinderella has stayed continuously in print for seven decades, still used as a relatively faithful, non Disney introduction to Perrault's original telling of the story.