Marie Magdalene Elisabeth Hassenpflug was a German author whose versions of various folk tales were an important source for the collection of tales by the Brothers Grimm. She is best known for her versions of "Little Red Riding Hood", "Sleeping Beauty", and "Snow White".
Life
Marie Magdalene Elisabeth Hassenpflug was born in the Ortsteil Altenhaßlau of Linsengericht district in Landgrafschaft Hessen-Darmstadt, Imperial State of Holy Roman Empire on 27 December 1788. Her father Johannes Hassenpflug had been married since 1788 to Marie Magdalena Dresen, who came from a Huguenot family living in Hanau. On 14 October 1789, the family moved into a house called Haus Lossow at the marketplace's corner of Lindenstraße in Neustadt, when her father was appointed the Schultheiß of Neustadt-Hanau. She grew up in that house, where the family lived until 1799. She had a brother, Hans Ludwig Alexander, as well as two sisters, Jeanette and Amalie. She was sickly when young, and one scholar, Heinz Rölleke, surmises that frequent bouts of being bedridden may have made her more receptive to fairy tales. Through another family, the Engelhards, she became friends with the Grimm family. Her brother Ludwig married the sister Lotte of the Brothers Grimm. On 15 April 1799, the Hassenpflug family moved to Kassel, where her father transferred to the post of advocatus fisci of the Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel. On 21 August 1814, Marie Hassenpflug married Friedrich von Dalwigk zu Schauenburg, who was stationed in Hanau as a captain of the Kurprinz regiment. They lived on her husband's estate in Hoof and in Hanau, where their son, Ludwig Alexander, was born on 24 January 1817. From 1819 to 1824, she served as a court lady to HerzoginMarie Friederike von Anhalt-Bernburg, a daughter of the Landgraf and later KurfürstWilhelm IX/I of Hesse-Kassel. When her husband was the chamberlain of the duchess, they lived in the Hanau City Palace. She died in Kassel on 21 November 1856.
Literary significance
Hassenpflug wrote a series of fairy tales that the Grimm brothers adapted for their children's and household fairy tales : Little Brother and Sister, Little Red Riding Hood, The Girl Without Hands, The Robber Groom, Daumerling's Wanderings, Sleeping Beauty, The Water Mermaid, The Golden Key, Phoenix Bird, The Blacksmith and the Devil, Der Froschprinz, the text fragment with the louse, and possibly Snow White. The identification of Herman Grimm's "Old Marie" with the much younger Marie Hassenpflug, which Heinz Rölleke made in a 1991 essay, also explains the sometimes verbatim correspondence with similar fairy tales by Charles Perrault: her mother was a Huguenot from the Dauphiné, and thus the family was well acquainted with French fairy tales, which Marie, as well as her sisters Jeannette and Amalia, then told to the Grimms.
