The Bee and the Orange Tree (2019) by Australian writer Melissa Ashley tells the story of French author Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy (c 1651 – 1705) who published the 1st ever literary fairy tale and who coined the term “fairy tale”.

One of the principal characters in the story is Marie Catherine’s imagined daughter Angelina who was raised in a convent from the age of 4 – allegedly so Angelina won’t be married off early - and who has recently been set free to work as Marie Catherine’s sectary.

Angelina is acutely aware that to the convent come pregnant women who leave their newborn babies behind. There are also orphans living there.

The novel concludes with Marie Catherine overcoming a bout of writer’s block and penning “The Bee and the Orange Tree”, first published by the actual Marie Catherine in 1697 and about a baby princess who was shipwrecked and taken in by a couple of ogres. This fairy tale was retold for a German audience a century later in a Brothers Grimm anthology.