What fun! I'm quite certain that I read this several years ago, but I had forgotten - have to love my convenient memory. It really comes in handy when I am economizing and trying to buy fewer books.
Sophie, our heroine, is quite amazingly calm about her fate. As the eldest of three, she is doomed (by fairy tale tradition) to be a failure. As we all know, it is the youngest that is fated for glory. In accord with tradition, after the death of the mother of the older two girls, their father remarries and has another daughter, then dies himself. Unlike the obvious parallel tale, the stepmother is quite fond of all three girls and raises them all as her own. She apprentices the two younger out and keeps Sophie with her to learn the milliner's trade in expectation of inheriting the shop some day - as the eldest.
As she makes and trims hats, Sophie, all unwittingly, is enchanting them - which earns her the enmity of the evil Witch of the Waste - who turns her (no, not into a toad) but into a ninety year-old crone.
Sophie decides to make the best of things as an old woman - and actually discovers that it has its advantages. Old women may be excused for some rather outrageous behavior - my own grandmother being a case in point. "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, and a red had that doesn't go." Grandmother never wore purple, and the Red Hat ladies are the very antithesis of the spirit of Jennie Joseph's poem. And, besides, I was talking about Sophie Hatter.
Although Sophie is philosophical about old age, and does not particularly seek to have her own curse reversed, it is reversed - eventually - and she reverts to being a beautiful seventeen year old. And - in a radical break with tradition - does not win the heart of the handsome prince - but that of the handsome wizard - and finds suitable husbands for both of her sisters.
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