The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty is a novel by Anne Rice, published in 1983 under the pen name A. N. Roquelaure and the first book of a trilogy.

The novel takes the traditional fairy tale and asks what the story leaves out. Its Sleeping Beauty is woken by a prince who claims her as his reward not with a kiss but with an initiation, and who then carries her off to his own kingdom, where she is trained in the customs of his household and made subject to his authority. Rice wrote the book as an erotic retelling, so the interest is in the power the prince exercises and in the terms on which Beauty eventually accepts it, which is a great deal less sentimental than the version children are told. The trilogy continues her story through further volumes and through a world in which the economy of a kingdom is bound up with these arrangements, and it was written at the same period as the author's better-known supernatural fiction.

The book belongs to the tradition of fairy-tale retellings for adults, and its subject is consent, appetite and the invention of a court that runs on both.