Reimagining "The Goose Girl"

I’m going to be honest with you. I was already familiar with the story of The Goose Girl, but the real inspiration came from reading other retellings. Some kept with the original story and had the maid take the princess’s place by force, others had the princess force the maid to impersonate her so she could escape a marriage she didn’t want. Every time, one of the parties was unwilling.

So what could happen to make both the princess and the maid switch places willingly? The most obvious answer I could think of was that there was an assassin on the loose and the maid was acting as the princess’s decoy, only they got stuck.

If she was going to impersonate Adele perfectly, Olivia needed to know how royalty would act. (The maid in the original story certainly acted like a princess – a nasty, spoiled, bratty one.) I decided to make Olivia a servant of noble birth instead of someone who just happened to be working for the princess. A key inspiration for this was Anne Boleyn, who was lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. That was a position Tudor courtiers would have tried to secure for their daughters.

A fictional inspiration was (and sorry if you haven’t seen the film) Sabé from The Phantom Menace. She knew Queen Amidala’s mannerisms and demeanour well enough to fool the invading Trade Federation – and she was clearly a very good actress.

Kieron was an intriguing addition. The idea for him came from researching the legend of Cú Chulainn, who trained under a warrior woman with his best friend Ferdiad. There was nobody he trusted to fight by his side more than Ferdiad (until they ended up on opposing sides in a war).

I’m going to be honest with you: the princess in The Goose Girl isn’t exactly the most proactive fairytale protagonist. The character who really comes up with a solution to the problem is the king, who works out the loophole in the ‘can’t tell a living soul’ and has the princess whisper her secret to an old stove. In The Princess and the Handmaid, Adele is the one who figures out the loophole.