Beauty

Beauty is a novel by the American writer Robin McKinley, published in 1978 and a retelling of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. It was her first book.

The merchant Roderick Huston has three daughters, and the youngest, Honour, has been called Beauty since she was small. She is bookish and unglamorous, and she grows up expecting to be the sister nobody notices. When her father's trading ships fail, the family moves from the city to a small town, and Honour discovers a competence in ordinary work that surprises her. On a later journey he takes shelter at a castle where he is fed and looked after by an unseen host, and on leaving he picks a rose, which brings the beast's demand down on the household. Honour offers herself in his place, and the rest of the novel is her life in the castle: the library, the garden and the company of a creature she gradually stops being afraid of.

Almost twenty years later the author returned to the same fairy tale in another novel, Rose Daughter.