We’ve all heard the story: an orphaned beauty, a wicked stepmother, two dullard stepsisters, and then, by sheer magic, a fairy godmother, a pair of glass slippers, and a happily ever after. From kind, saintly Cinderella’s perspective, there has always been one obvious villain: Lady Tremaine, the wicked stepmother who likely married her father for his money, then saw in his death an opportunity to banish Cinderella to the attic, to friendly mice and a life of servitude, all while she watches her family home crumble. But what the classic tale fails to account for is the woman before Lady Tremaine: a mother.

Equal parts fantasy reimagining and riveting historical fiction, Rachel Hochhauser’s LADY TREMAINE acts as a corrective to the story you thought you knew.

My name is Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley. Introducing herself to readers, Lady Tremaine begins the story of the daughter of a brewer bred to become a wife and mother. Though Ethel's father worked a respectable trade, her family was still far from gentility. And with her mother long dead, her marriage prospects --- and abilities to secure those prospects --- are low.

So when the Tremaines, a wealthy merchant family who visits Ethel’s village for hunting season, arrive with their healthy, strapping sons in tow, she immediately begins to imagine a future with the family’s golden boy, Henry. Although the two maintain a cautious friendship over years of hunting seasons --- their affections bolstered by a shared interest in falconry, of all things --- their social ranks threaten to keep them apart, especially when Henry arrives one year with Miss Sigrid Camelia White, the daughter of Sir Harris White, a titled man. Against all odds, Ethel manages to secure Henry’s interest, though she doesn’t know it won’t be her last battle.

"What Gregory Maguire has done for the Wicked Witch of the West, Rachel Hochhauser has done for the wicked stepmother to beat all wicked stepmothers.... LADY TREMAINE is a stunning, masterfully realized and urgently necessary corrective to the myth of the evil stepmother."

Unusual for their time, Ethel and Henry’s marriage is one not just of suitable rank and dowry, but of desire as well. By all accounts, their early years are lovely, resulting in two daughters --- born only 12 months apart --- Matilda and Rosamund. But of course, there can be no evil stepmother without her own widowing. So when Henry meets a tragic demise along the road, Ethel knows that she must marry again to protect her girls. When she hears of a much-desired titled man named Lord Robert Bramley and his unmothered daughter, she sees an opportunity. After all, if there is one thing she knows how to do --- in her mind, but also in her heart and the very fiber of her being --- it is to mother. She would do anything for Matilda and Rosamund.

Death, as we know, comes again, but with it the realization that Lord Bramley’s lovely daughter, Elin, is feckless to a fault. It is here, in the descriptions of young, saintly, grieving Elin, that the narrative comes into sharp, glittering relief. Although Elin refuses to participate in the care and keeping of the home, now that all the servants have left and the families’ funds have dried up, Hochhauser carefully cements Elin in her time and status, clarifying that “there [is] no malice in her reluctance. Not, even, an insistence on being coddled. Elin believed, truly, in the necessity of her own gentility. It was all she had left.” Having grieved a mother, a family and two husbands, Ethel understands grief, but even she has a limit.

When the famed ball announcing the prince’s search for a wife is announced, Ethel is on her very last penny, thread and nerve. So when the lauded invitation to audition to become the prince’s bride finally arrives, and it is not her daughters’ names but Elin’s printed in gold calligraphy, Ethel watches helplessly as the future she dreamed of for Matilda and Rosamund is snatched away by the self-righteous Elin.

But Ethel knows more about the royal family than she has ever really let on. As she accompanies her stepdaughter into the court and all of its cutthroat intrigue, she must wonder if the life she has always dreamed of is nothing more than a gilded cage…and if Elin, who has always rejected her as a mother, is worth saving. Poignant, stunningly written musings of motherhood, daughterhood and a woman’s autonomy follow, all of it serving to rewrite the story of history’s most famous stepmother.

What Gregory Maguire has done for the Wicked Witch of the West, Rachel Hochhauser has done for the wicked stepmother to beat all wicked stepmothers. Elevating the twice-widowed Lady Tremaine from her cartoonish roots, Hochhauser instead peels back the layers of cold, shrewd civility to expose the woman underneath: desperate, frayed, prideful and, above all, a mother. Rather than casting her to the shadows of villainy, she firmly places Lady Tremaine within her time --- first as a daughter forced to straddle the line between yeomanry and gentry, and educated only in the ways to rise above it through the portal of marriage, and later as a widowed mother who has seen one too many poor women relegated to lives of prostitution, abuse and death.

Acknowledging the limited roles of women at the time, a young Ethel muses that “[a] marriage can be violent, even if a man is not.” But it is this self-awareness that makes her grief at losing her first husband, her true beloved, all the more cutting and transformative. Lady Tremaine, seen previously only in the most untenable, desperate situation of her life, does something radical, for both her time and her status: she dares to desire. And it is this glimmer of hope, this spark of humanity, that makes her machinations to climb all the more heartbreaking and relatable.

Exposed in all her complications and layers, Ethel is the absolute star of LADY TREMAINE. While it seems a disservice to devote any more attention to her pious stepdaughter, I must add that it is in her assessments of Elin that her full depth comes to light. A devoted mother herself, Ethel is often surprised that she cannot summon the same all-encompassing affection that she has for her daughters for this young woman she has been tasked to “mother.” But even then, she --- through the lens of her own grief and keen gaze --- understands the girl in a way that no one but a fellow orphan can.

Perfect for readers of WEYWARD, CLYTEMNESTRA and, of course, WICKED, LADY TREMAINE is a stunning, masterfully realized and urgently necessary corrective to the myth of the evil stepmother.