Lady Tremaine is a retelling of the classic Cinderella fairy tale. The original story is widely attributed to Charles Perrault, who published the story in 1697. However, the story has earlier origins in ancient Greek and Asian traditions. In 1812, the story was retold by the Brothers Grimm, with darker, more violent, gothic overtones. More recently, the Disney version of Cinderella has become embedded within the zeitgeist and takes its primary inspirations from Perrault’s version of the story. In these iterations, a widower remarries a woman who has two daughters—all three women are selfish, vain, and proud. The new wife (or stepmother character) is jealous of the widower’s beautiful, genteel daughter, Cinderella. The stepmother forces Cinderella into servitude after her father dies and later tries to sabotage her attempts at marrying the prince. However, in both the Perrault and Disney versions, a fairy-godmother character comes to Cinderella’s aid and helps her win the prince’s heart. In the Grimms’ version, the stepsisters meet a violent end—justice for their unkindness toward their stepsister.

In Lady Tremaine, Hochhauser recasts the story by writing the tale from the stepmother Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley’s first-person