Ella Enchanted

Ella Enchanted is a novel by Gail Carson Levine, published by HarperCollins in 1997 and named a Newbery Honor book.

Ella of Frell receives a fairy's gift at her birth, and the gift is obedience: whatever she is told to do, she must do, from standing on one leg for a day and a half to obeying an order that would kill her. Her mother understands the danger and extracts a promise that Ella will keep the curse a secret, which means that the one thing she cannot explain is also the thing that governs her life. The novel follows her attempts to break the spell, through a world of princes, ogres, giants, wicked stepsisters and fairy godmothers, and it gives her a courtship with a prince who has to be convinced that the girl he likes is not simply agreeable. Ella's problem is that obedience is the quality everybody praises in a young woman, and her story is about insisting on being able to choose.

Levine retells the Cinderella material by asking where the heroine's compliance comes from, and the answer she supplies turns the story into an argument about consent.