When Beauty Tamed the Beast

When Beauty Tamed the Beast is a historical romance by the American writer Eloisa James, published in 2011. It is a retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast.

Linnet Berry Thrynne is a celebrated beauty, and the man she finds herself engaged to is a beast: difficult, unlikely to return her feelings, and a genuine danger to the plans she has made for her own life. The novel follows what happens to a young woman who has been given everything that beauty is supposed to bring and then finds herself bound to somebody who may never love her back, and it asks what she would be prepared to give up in order to reach him. The book belongs to James's habit of taking a fairy story and placing it in the social world of the English nobility, and its setting moves between that world and Wales. The subjects of the story are the questions that a fairy tale retelling tends to raise: what beauty is worth, and what it costs to be tamed by somebody else.

James writes historical romances, many of them built on the plots of fairy tales and of Shakespeare's comedies, and this is one of the fairy-tale retellings.