With today marking the bicentenary of the publication of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Sara Maitland writes that the Grimms' Cinderella was very different from the one we know and love - she didn't sit weeping by the fire and she wasn't stupid enough to drop her own slipper.
Classic fairy-story plots frequently depend on secrets, on things being hidden and needing to be found.
One of the things that is most regularly disguised is the true identity of a character; in this sense (though not in others), fairy tales have a very modern understanding of personality, of individual identity: inside each of us is a core 'real' self.
Your social role, public appearance, background, how people regard you, even your class do not affect this - they are just 'false conditioning', and in the end the truth will out, the secrets of the heart will come to light.
But at another level, these secrets are simply a plot device to spin out a tale. So profound a narrative device does this secrecy become that in some of the stories there is absolutely no logical reason whatsoever for it, but it is there simply to hold the plot together.
'Cinderella' is a fascinating case in point. It is one of the stories that has become most distorted in its popular development, while at the same time it is probably the most successful and widely known of all the tales.
But the version we know has surprisingly little in common even with the last Grimms' redacted tale - published in 1812 - and the changes are instructive.
In the first place, the 'ugly' stepsisters are not ugly – they are 'beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart'; their true natures are hidden by their pretty faces.
More importantly, there is no Fairy Godmother. She appears in the version of Cinderella published by Charles Perrault in 1697.
There was no fairy godmother, here played by Jenny Eclair, in the Grimms' tale.
Instead, the plot develops somewhat differently: one day, the father is going to the fair and asks his daughters what they would like him to bring them back.
'Beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels,' say the stepsisters. 'The first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home,' says Cinderella – a passing reference to the fact that he will travel through a wood on his journey.
Unusually for a father in a fairy story, he does not forget or blunder. Fathers tend not to get very sympathetic treatment in fairy stories in general - good mothers die and stepmothers are evilly intended, but fathers are simply useless. For example, what on earth was Cinderella's father doing while his wife enslaved his own child?
That aside, on this occasion, Cinderella's father did come home with the promised goods. Cinderella takes the hazel branch and plants it on her birth mother's grave.
It grows into a 'handsome tree' and Cinderella visits it three times a day. A little white bird lives in the tree and 'if Cinderella expressed a wish, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for'.
When the Prince's ball is announced, Cinderella wants to go and her stepmother sets her the impossible challenge of sorting lentils from ashes to see if she is worthy. Cinderella calls on some birds, though not apparently the bird of her tree, to help her and is thus successful.
However, her stepmother reneges on her promise and she and the stepsisters go off the ball.
Cinderella's response is prompt – no sitting by the fire and weeping in this earlier version. She goes 'at once' to the tree and gets a pretty frock which she puts on 'with all speed' and hastens to the party.
Now everything proceeds as in the version we know, except, of course, that it is Cinderella's free choice – rather than a restriction imposed upon her by the Fairy Godmother – to leave the ball and keep her identity secret.
She repeats this sequence for the traditional three evenings, but far from being so stupid as to drop her slipper, it transpires that the Prince has cunningly covered the staircase with pitch so that the slipper sticks to it; she cannot stop to pick it up because he is pursuing her – and she has to hide in the dovecot.
In the original tale the slipper is not glass but simply 'small and dainty and all golden'. The slipper became glass at a double remove: Perrault, in his version, made it a 'fur slipper'; the French word for 'fur' is 'ver', and the French word for 'glass' is 'verre'. In a moment of erroneous inspiration, the English translator got it wrong – or rather, deeply, though accidentally, right.
Interestingly, the original involves a much less passive and more energetic Cinderella forging her own destiny, but it also does not make much sense.
Since the tree will give her what she wants just for the asking, why is she still slaving for her stepmother? More crucially though, why does she choose to leave the ball repeatedly, run away and hide, and above all conceal her identity – right up to the very end?
The assumption that a story needs a secret has, in this instance, overwhelmed the requirements of plot, motivation and character. So, although we lose an unusually active heroine, the present popular version makes a much better story.
There is an argument that there is good psychological sense in the Grimms' version of this story: Cinderella needs to test not herself but the Prince. She does not, following the betrayal of her father, who behaves rather worse in the original, dare to risk a 'one-night stand'.
It is the Prince who has to prove his worthiness by searching for and finding the 'true bride'. But if that was the underlying message of the story, it is much obscured – partly by the Prince being bizarrely easy to deceive.
He carries off each of the stepsisters in turn, and Cinderella's birds have to point out to him that their feet are bleeding where they sliced off pieces of toe or heel to make the slipper fit.
In any event, no comment is passed on Cinderella's motives or intentions.
This is a fairy story, after all - a narrative form where things are surprising and secret but need no explanation, and where women know their true identity but keep it hidden.
This is an edited extract from Sara Maitland's latest book, Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales.