Gut Recognition: A Guest Post by Rachel Hochhauser

Sinister stepmother or misunderstood matriarch? This retelling of Cinderella brings a new side to a familiar fairy tale for a bold examination of a mother’s love and resilience. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Rachel Hochhauser on writing Lady Tremaine.

Lady Tremaine stemmed from one moment of gut recognition.

Like many young girls, I grew up steeped in fairy tales. I loved Cinderella—the pomp and pageantry. The sense that somewhere beyond the ordinary world, a fantastic life was waiting. But as I grew older—especially once I became the mother of two young daughters myself—the architecture of those stories began to press in. Why was beauty, and niceness, rewarded above all else?

During a particularly challenging season of my own parenting journey, I came across a depiction of Cinderella’s so-called evil stepmother. I was familiar with her contours—the grand swoop of her hair, the purpled eyes. But sitting there, for the first time, I didn’t see a villain. I saw a mother like me. A woman doing whatever she believed necessary to take care of her family. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I set out to write Lady Tremaine not so much to redeem a villain as to grant her the same care and attention we do our heroes.

I began by stripping the story down to its bones. There are more than 500 recorded versions of Cinderella across cultures and centuries. The earlier Western European variants—the ones that most directly inform our pop culture understanding—are darker than the gloss many of us associate with the fairytale. There is violence and blood and envy. It is a story about power as much as it is about romance. That realization led me to the social machinery beneath the fairy tale. I asked myself: if this story were grounded in historical truth, what would it actually look like?

From the beginning, I was intentional about time and place. I anchored the novel in a seventeenth-century–inspired world where property, lineage, and marriage contracts were not abstractions but matters of survival. I researched inheritance law, household hierarchies, and even falconry manuals, because I wanted the setting to feel tactile. If Lady Tremaine was to make the choices she makes, the stakes had to be real.

Ultimately, Lady Tremaine became, for me, a story about survival in a world that offers women very narrow corridors of power. It is about motherhood and ambition and about the stories we absorb as children. Retelling Cinderella was not an act of rebellion so much as an act of excavation. I wanted to look again at a woman we think we know and ask: what if her version was the one we were missing all along?