For years Disney – arguably the biggest purveyor of fairytales – fed into these narratives. It’s only recently that the studio has been producing films like Tangled, Frozen and Moana, where the female heroines are nuanced and have agency.

And writers have also been contributing to the retelling of fairytales: Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks was a feminist retelling of The Little Mermaid while Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles places Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White in a dystopian future where they must rescue themselves. And of course, no piece about fairytale retellings would be complete without mentioning Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, a dark, feminist collection.

Young adult literature is full of retellings, which is understandable when you consider that many of the books young people are reading at school – the aforementioned literary canon that’s heavy on men writing books decades ago – don’t reflect their reality. Later this year will see the release of two popular classic novels reimagined for a feminist YA audience: Kit de Waal’s Becoming Dinah is a response to Moby Dick, while The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is the untold story of the brides of Dracula.

There will be those who argue that retellings of classic literature are unoriginal and no better than the endless remakes of films that are obsessing Hollywood at the moment. But that’s an unfair criticism. Good retellings don’t just rehash the original story, they give it a new spin or tell it in a new way. And, crucially, a retelling doesn’t result in the disappearance of the original text – good reimaginings can sit comfortably alongside the books they take inspiration from, and even, sometimes, enhance them.

Images: Getty / Women’s Prize for Fiction

How women are rewriting the literary canon