Fairy Tale Heroine: Live and Write Her Journey

The author of Story Power reimagines and examines the Hero's Journey through the lens of the feminine quest.  

The hero’s journey dominates the world’s narrative while the heroine’s journey, based on the age-old, long-suppressed foundational fairy tales, has been lost to time. To restore this great legacy, Kate Farrell explores the hidden terrain of the feminine quest in folk literature, digging deep, hitting the bedrock of the ancient heroine’s journey with the mythic language Joseph Campbell gave to the modern hero. In this way, Fairy Tale Heroine now meets its cultural moment.

From a heritage that is wide and profound, stories of courageous heroines and their daunting tasks, are gathered from the oral traditions of the matriarchal cultures of Old Europe. Farrell rediscovers the feminine quest with lively commentaries on their layers of symbolic meanings. Each fairy tale reflects aspects of the feminine psyche today, as cited in the research of Jungian scholars, and demonstrated in the range of stories discussed, from classics like “Snow White” and “Cinderella” to film and fiction of pop culture.

Readers will find themselves in the heroine’s journey and writers will translate its archetypes, motifs, tropes, and characters to their creative work helped by prompts, writing exercises, and personal examples from each chapter.

Kate Farrell is a well-known storyteller and author of the recent, award-winning, how-to book, Story Power; she founded the California Word Weaving Storytelling Project and published influential, educational materials promoting storytelling as a teaching strategy. Now she’s weaving her lifelong work of teaching, the oral tradition, and intensive research in telling the heroine’s journey anew. An octogenarian, Kate willingly accepts the role of the crone with the honor and status it once held, that of hard earned wisdom and creative self-attainment.