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Jane Harrington’s new book, “Women of the Fairy Resistance,” restores seven French women whose magical stories quietly rebelled against the restrictive society of Louis XIV’s reign.

Known as les conteuses, these writers gathered in French salons and created tales filled with princesses, silver towers, enchanted animals and unusually gifted fairies. One of the women even coined the term “fairy tale.”

Beneath their seemingly harmless plots, however, were challenges to misogyny, homophobia and rigid expectations for women. Their stories often placed capable female protagonists at the center, rejecting the notion that women were weak, unintelligent or meant to remain hidden from public life.

The tales remained popular for roughly a century before the women and their work gradually faded from view. Later storytellers, including Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, came to dominate the genre. Harrington says the Grimms deliberately disparaged les conteuses, comparing them to animals and warning readers about their supposed depravity.

“Women of the Fairy Resistance” profiles seven of the salon writers and presents a dozen retellings drawn from original French versions. Harrington identified about 70 tales but selected those that most clearly showed their authors resisting the social rules of their era.

Researching the stories presented serious obstacles. Many had never been translated into English, while other 19th-century translations never reached the United States. Because Harrington does not read French, she used translation software, but the irregular type in old texts sometimes forced her to work sentence by sentence.

Harrington began exploring the subject eight or nine years ago while teaching fairy tales at the college level. She accumulated research gradually and submitted a book proposal about two years ago. When the proposal was accepted with a request for further research, she discovered that some claims from English-language scholars were inaccurate and had to revise earlier work.

“Every storyteller has their own spin, and translations can be wildly subjective and creative,” Harrington said. “It was a really intensive year.”

Harrington grew up in Fairfax and moved to Alexandria in the 1990s, where she married and raised her children. She became known for writing children’s books and teaching through public and private schools and the park system.

Now living in Appalachia, she writes literary fiction and creative nonfiction. A recently published novel received a starred library-journal review declaring that it belonged on every shelf devoted to the art form.

Harrington also teaches a fairy-tale course at Washington and Lee University. She said artificial intelligence’s ability to produce a strong academic essay in less than a minute led her to replace some literary criticism assignments with creative writing.

“I usually do try to have them write a fairy tale using their own experience,” she said. “Let’s write something with a heart that a robot can’t write.”

Harrington is scheduled to discuss and sign “Women of the Fairy Resistance” at Old Town Books in Alexandria on Nov. 16 from 7 to 8 p.m.