Rags To Royalty / Literature

• In A Brother's Price, the Whistler family aren't really poor, but Jerin is used to hard work, and does all the cooking, washing, etc. for a big household as his main responsibility, with the help of as many younger sisters as he can get to help him. Once his royal heritage is revealed (his grandfather Alannon was a prince), Jerin becomes a Suddenly Suitable Suitor to the princesses of the realm, and, after some obstacles are removed, is engaged to marry them.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Feyre, Cinderella-style. She starts out living in poverty and struggling to feed herself and her family, then becomes the wife-to-be of Tamlin, High Lord of the Spring Court. She ends up being with Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court, and does one better by being named High Lady, putting her on equal footing with Rhys.
• The Princess Diaries books are a deconstruction — Mia was as happy as any other teen at first and horrified to discover she was a princess. Being a princess is difficult, and her grandmother is...trying...to say the least. However, Mia eventually discovers she has gained fame, which she can use to try and right what she sees as social injustices and wrongs.
• The Belgariad had Garion, a male Sleeping Beauty.
• The original Deltora Quest series. The missing heir turns out to be a Sleeping Beauty type, raised in secret to protect them from the Shadow Lord before ascending to the throne in the final book of the first series. Their eventual spouse is in a similar boat, as a Cinderella type. In the backstory, King Adin got there The Hard Way; he was a humble blacksmith who went on a long and difficult quest to unite the seven tribes of the Land of Dragons against their common Enemy. Once the united tribes succeeded in driving the Shadow Lord back under his leadership, they named Adin their first king.
• Discworld:
  • Emberella in Witches Abroad starts out as a parody of Cinderella, but turns out to be a more-or-less straight Sleeping Beauty.
  • Captain Carrot in the Watch series is a parody of the male Sleeping Beauty; once he learns his true heritage, he makes damn sure no-one finds out. (Including executing one persistent monarchist for treachery against the Patrician.)
  • Wyrd Sisters is also a subversion of the male Sleeping Beauty: Like Carrot, Tomjon doesn't want the job once he learns his heritage, so it instead goes to his half-brother Verence who's actually a half-brother on the mother's side and so, strictly speaking, doesn't have Royal Blood at all.
  • The above caveats aside, Wyrd Sisters also sets up Lords and Ladies in making Magrat a fairly straight example of the Cinderella.
• Sergeant Nimashet Despreaux in John Ringo and David Weber's Prince Roger series subverts the trope by recognizing that it is not a good idea for a bodyguard to be attracted to the person she's guarding. Also, since she is from a hick planet, she doesn't want to get anywhere near the Decadent Court that plagues the Empire of Man. She actually has to be ORDERED by her CO to have a relationship with the prince because they need to get him out of a depressed funk. Later on, when he becomes heir to the throne, she gets cold feet. She then has to be ORDERED by her CO to marry him so that she can serve as his moderating influence and conscience.
• In the children's novel Just Ella, by Margaret Haddix, the trope is subverted. Having gotten to the ball by her own devices, she is dogged by rumors it was really a fairy godmother. She finds that court life is stifling, the poor are horribly downtrodden, and Prince Charming is stupid and unfeeling.
• Kate Forsythe's Rhiannon o' the Dubhslain (a Sleeping Beauty).
• Thanks to Royally Screwed Up, in Deep Secret, Maree, Nick, and Rob the Centaur are all secretly Princes/Princesses; Nick / Nicothodes is of the Snow White variety, while Maree and Rob are both Sleeping Beauties. While Maree / Sempronia is technically the eldest and next in line, Rob the centaur in the one who ascends to the throne. Sort of.
• Subverted in The Secret of Platform 13, where the Prince of a magical island is kidnapped by a Rich Bitch who wanted a son; when agents of his parents track her down years later, they find that the child, now named Raymond, has turned into a Spoiled Brat. Double Subverted when it turns out that the prince is actually Ben, the family's poor servant who is far nicer than Raymond.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs's heroes and heroines are generally of high birth but sometimes feature as Sleeping Beauties or Snow Whites.
  • Tarzan of the Apes turns out to be an English nobleman lost in a ship wreck as a young child.
  • In The Master Mind of Mars, the heroine, Valla Dia, is in flight after the conquest of her city; only at the end she does reveal herself to be the princess of it.
  • In A Fighting Man of Mars, the hero meets a slave girl Tavia; only at the end it is revealed that she is a princess by blood. (Even she didn't know.)
  • The Cave Girl was a ship-wrecked child of Spanish nobility.
  • In The Monster Men, the hero is revealed to be amnesiac, and an upper-class American.
  • In The Chessman of Mars, the hero, a prince, disguises himself as a poor mercenary because he had given the heroine a bad first impression as a prince.
• Mercedes Lackey:
  • In the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, Godmother Elena was destined to be a Cinderella, but gave that up in favor of becoming a Godmother because the prince of her kingdom was way too young for her. She later ends up marrying a different prince, a second son who joins her in upholding her Godmother duties.
  • In the Heralds of Valdemar novels, Talia of the Arrows Trilogy is a Cinderella and Winterhart of the Mage Wars trilogy is a Snow White.
  • In The Fire Rose, Rose Hawkins is a Cinderella.
  • In Phoenix and Ashes, Eleanor Robinson is a Cinderella.
  • In Reserved for the Cat, Ninette Dupond is Cinderella.
  • In The Gates of Sleep, Marina is a Sleeping Beauty.
  • Maya Witherspoon of The Serpent's Shadow and Phoenix and Ashes is a Snow White.
• In John Barnes' One for the Morning Glory, Calliope is secretly the princess of a neighboring country, smuggled to safety. She ends up getting herself crowned and then marrying Prince Amatus and being queen, although at one point she does wish that she could marry Amatus as just the nobleman's daughter she passes herself off as; as a princess, the political aspects are a little obvious.
• Greek Mythology goes a step beyond with the Legend of Eros and Psyche. Although Psyche is actually a princess by right, she goes one scale higher, to get married by the God of Love himself in disguise. Then Zeus makes her immortal.
• Ceddy, AKA Cedrik Errol, of Little Lord Fauntleroy, is another example of the 'rags to riches' and 'hidden nobility' part of this trope. His father was the son of a very rich and anti-American Lord, his mother was the orphaned and much abused lady-in-waiting of a Rich Bitch, they got together despite the Parental Marriage Veto, after the dad was disinherited they lived a middle-to-poor-class but happy life with little Cedric, and it's only after the father's death that Cedric learns his origins and then goes to England to meet his paternal family.
• Princess Augusta a.k.a. Mickle of Lloyd Alexander's Westmark is a combination Sleeping Beauty/Goose Girl type: she doesn't remember her royal heritage thanks to traumatic amnesia, and the country believes that she's dead. Deconstructed somewhat in the sequels, where noble and foreign disapproval of her commoner upbringing sets the plot in motion.
• Also from Lloyd Alexander are Taran and Princess Eilonwy in The Chronicles of Prydain. Eilonwy is an aversion of the Snow White in that she isn't on the run from her royal lineage, but was stolen as an infant. She's somewhat of a Goose Girl, in that she is perfectly well aware that she's a Princess of Llyr, but when she meets protagonist Taran in the first book, she doesn't bother to mention it at any point — not because she feels like she needs to hide the truth, but simply because rank doesn't matter to her. (This is averted in the animated adaptation, where she always introduces herself as a princess.) Taran himself, by the end of the series, is a Cinderella who makes a very abrupt transition from assistant pig-keeper to High King.
• In many variants of the medieval Chivalric Romance of Robert the Devil, the hero is living a life of menial labor when he rescues the princess and gets to marry her. Unusually, this is his own choice: his parents had wished for a child — whether from God or the Devil. The son is therefore born possessed by evil, and he is doing penance for the evil he did.
• In many chivalric romances such as Vitae Duorum Offarum, Emare, Mai and Beaflor, and La Belle Helene de Constantinople, the heroine escapes her father threatening marriage and wins the heart of a king. After she has a child, she is slandered and driven out again, only reuniting with her husband after much tribulation. (See "The Girl Without Hands" under Fairy Tales.)
• In the Chivalric Romance Sir Amadas, Amadas wins the hand of the princess with the aid of a mysterious White Knight, who proves to be a dead man whose burial he had secured.
• In the Chivalric Romance King Horn, Horn, after being cast adrift in a boat as a boy, returned to his father's kingdom to reclaim it.
• The titular character of Havelok the Dane is a Sleeping Beauty; the long lost son of the king of Dnemark who was saved after his father was dethroned and killed. Depending on the version, he was either too young to remember his heritage or lost his memories as a prince. He eventually learsn his heritage and returns to claim his throne.
  • Havelok's wife, Princess Goldburow, is a Snow White type, being the rightful heiress to her father's kingdom but married off to the seemingly common Havelok by her greedy uncle in order to steal her inheritance. Like Havelok, she eventually reclaims her throne.
• In the Chivalric Romance Roswall and Lillian, the hero is attacked by his own servant and must promise to never reveal the attack to save his own life. He wins the princess in a tournament with the aid of magical helpers who give him armor and weapons.
• Aragorn/Strider, of The Lord of the Rings, is somewhere between Goose Girl and Snow White. He's the heir to two dynasties (one a dynasty and people without a proper state, the other a land without a king), lives with his identity hidden for safety reasons, and was kept ignorant of his heritage during his childhood in Rivendell (which was nowhere near "rags" territory). As an adult he takes on the leadership of his people, and spends most of his time away from home fighting the horrors of the Enemy, whether to protect unwitting hobbits and Men in Eriador or as leader in the armies of Rohan and Gondor under the name Thorongil. Additionally, his line has been living this way for more than a dozen generations before their kingdom is finally restored. Aragorn's early life is a lot like that of King Arthur, who was placed for adoption by Merlin to keep him hidden and safe from his enemies until he could claim his throne.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy uses the Goose Girl: Freed slave Thorby goes through most of the novel with a variety of foster parents until he finally reaches a point where he can be identified by his footprints. He discovers that he's Thor Bradley Rudbek, long-lost heir of the obscenely wealthy Rudbek clan, sold into slavery as an infant when his parents were attacked by Space Pirates.
• Lessa of the Dragonriders of Pern series is a grown-up Snow White/Goose Girl ragged princess (albeit a Tsundere with emphasis on the Tsun) who survived the slaughter of her family when Fax took over her Hold by hiding as a kitchen drudge. She changes her goal — instead of taking back leadership of Ruatha Hold, she becomes a queen dragon rider and Weyrwoman (an even higher social rank).
• By the end of the Seventh Sword trilogy, this happens several times. The first of which is Katanjii, a minor character who breaks his arm early on, but discovers that he has a strong business sense that enables him to make business deals that always benefit him, despite his small stature, young age, and seeming innocence. The trilogy concludes with:
  • Nanjii, (Katanjii's older brother becoming the world's greatest swordsman, when he had started out as a poor protege).
  • Sonshu, the main protagonist becomes a king who is well-loved despite spending most of the story being despised by everyone.
  • Jaa, Sonshu's love interest and a slave becomes Sonshu's queen.
• Octavian in the Codex Alera series is a male in the Sleeping Beauty style, and his mother Isana was a Cinderella in the backstory and is a Goose Girl during the events of the main plot. Octavian only reveals his birthright after he has proven himself a brilliant military commander.
• Jame, the heroine of P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, is a Sleeping Beauty type; she believes herself the outcast, ragtag daughter of a minor Lord, but she turns out to be the sister of the Highlord of the Kencyrath — a situation that doesn't make her all that happy, because she chafes under (and eventually rejects) the restrictions of the role.
• In C. S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy: Shasta is Prince Cor, heir to the Archenland throne. He's a Sleeping Beauty type as he didn't know about that until the end, and only escaped from Calormen because neither he nor Bree wanted to be Made a Slave. At the end, Cor grows into The Wise Prince and a Reasonable Authority Figure as King Cor of Archenland.
  • Likewise, his foil Aravis was a Snow White: she ran away from her noble Calormen home after being badly shaken by the death of her much loved older brother and trying to escape from being the Trophy Wife to a high-ranked and much older Smug Snake (which was arranged by her Wicked Stepmother). She becomes Cor's traveling companion, then girlfriend, then wife, and with time, the Queen Consort of Archenland.
• In Robert E. Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel" Conan the Barbarian is proud of his going through this as a Self-Made Man.
• In Josepha Sherman's The Shining Falcon, Maria is reduced to a peasant's life before gaining Finist's love.
• In Beowulf, Hrothgar's queen is described as queenly and wearing gold, but her name is "Wealhtheow," which means "foreign slave."
• The Bible:
  • As mentioned above, David of Books of Samuel may be the biggest example of this in the Bible. He goes from being a humble shepherd to a hero by killing Goliath. Then he becomes a leader in King Saul's army, and eventually his son-in-law by marrying his daughter. When he is forced to flee, he becomes the leader of a group of mercenaries. When Saul is killed in battle, he becomes king of Judah. Then when Saul's son is assassinated, David becomes king of all of Israel.
  • In the Book of Esther, Esther is chosen to be queen (to replace Queen Vashti after her husband Ahasuerus/Xerxes banished her from the empire). Esther is an ordinary young girl, and at that one of the Jews living in exile in Babylon, but she is chosen by the king himself out of a harem on account of her beauty. She keeps herself there thanks to her charm and her wits, and ultimately saves her people.
• Princess Jenna from the Septimus Heap series grew up in a poor Wizard family before being called to become Princess at her tenth birthday.
• In Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords trilogy, or rather, its backstory, Yambu, the Silver Queen, was the rightful ruler of...Yambu, after her parents, the previous king and queen, were killed. Unfortunately, the people who killed them had somehow gotten the idea that they should be in charge now, so Yambu had to go on the run as a fugitive, where she was helped by a mysterious stranger who called himself the Emperor. Despite appearing to be a clown, he turned out to be a great warrior and a powerful wizard, and saved her repeatedly and became her lover, and ultimately led a successful military-diplomatic campaign to put her back on the throne. It was at that moment that he asked her to marry him, but....
  • Subverted with Yambu's daughter (by the Emperor), Ariane. Yambu, fearing her as a rival to her power, sells her into slavery. She is rescued from slavery by Baron Doon and his companions before anything really bad happens to her, but she is never put on the throne, and never returns to a state of royalty.
  • Played straight, though, with Mark: he grows up as a peasant, but becomes Prince Consort of Tasavalta after he marries Princess Kristin.
• Bria in The Last Dove is the Sleeping Beauty Style.
• Wendy in the Trylle Trilogy is a Sleeping Beauty Style. She finds out that she is actually a changeling troll who replaced her host family's original child, and she is actually the princess of the Trylle kingdom.
• The Daenerys plot from A Song of Ice and Fire is of The Goose Girl type. Daenerys begins as a Fallen Princess who is borderline sold off as a bride to Warrior Prince Drogo, and slowly begins to pick herself up and acquire her own power...
• Ani/ Isi of The Goose Girl is Goose Girl Style.
• The protagonist of The Bitterbynde undergoes an extremely dramatic Cinderella transformation. At the start of the first book, she's a deformed, nameless, spurned, and hated scullery servant in a noble house. By midway through the second book, she's won a name, a title and land, and is engaged to the King-Emperor, although this does not last.
• In John Moore's Fractured Fairy Tale, The Unhandsome Prince, Caroline knows she's destined for this. It was hard work finding the right frog to kiss. The only problem is that the standard deal is for a handsome prince. She knows that she's beautiful, and she'll be damned if she's going to settle!
• In John C. Wright's The Hermetic Millennia, one Chimera comments on how the lower class have cheap literature concentrating on Rags To Royalty Rescue Romance.
• In Seanan McGuire's October Daye novel Rosemary and Rue, Toby observes that as a duchess, Luna looks like a goosegirl raised to her position.
• Alaric in The Quest of the Unaligned is a Sleeping Beauty with a bit of a twist. He was never in any danger, rather he was sent to live in the city-state of Tonzimmiel instead of his native land of Caederan in order to ensure that he grew up magically balanced, away from the disruptive wind magic influencing the court. The original plan might have worked, but Alaric's Tonzimellian caretakers died when he was still fairly young, before they'd told him anything about his heritage, and he was sent into the orphanage system and only found just in time.
  • His Love Interest Laeshana is a fairly straight Cinderella. She is born into the white-sashes, the small caste of peasant mages despised by Caederan's nobility. However, her hard work, native brilliance, and loyalty to Prince Alaric conspire such that by the end of the story she is the second most powerful mage in the world and Crown Prince Alaric's bride.
• The Cinderella variant is played with, gender switched, and ultimately averted in Crucible of Gold. Captain John Granby was born the third son of a Newcastle coal-merchant and his commission in the Aerial Corps is if anything a step down by British standards. However when his dragon goes behind his back and gets him presented as a prospective political match for the Empress of the Inca he is anything but pleased and would not have been even if he were terribly interested in women. His joy at the arrival of Napoleon is palpable.
• In The Book of the New Sun, Severian is a ragged apprentice who becomes the Autarch - the leader of his Commonwealth ^note Severian's journey to the throne is so filled with obfuscation that it's easy to forget this was promised in chapter 1 and by extension the representative of Mankind. Severian is low-born (but with hints of noble blood), and it turns out many of his predecessors on the throne have been of similarly obscure origins, since leadership of the Commonwealth is a pawn in the machinations of higher powers.
• In Enchanted Forest Chronicles Cimorene deliberately made herself a Goose Girl because she was bored and wanted to get out of an Arranged Marriage, starting a life long friendship with Kazul the dragon in the process. Later in life, she is forced to become a Snow White after the wizards kidnap her husband. Her son, Daystar, however, is a Sleeping Beauty, who did not know that he was the heir to the Enchanted Forest until after he saved his father.
• In The Goblin Emperor, Maia technically held the title of Archduke all through his miserable adolescence, but as his father the emperor hated him and the cousin appointed to be his guardian after his mother's death also hated him, becoming emperor makes a very big difference in how he lives. Since he arrives at court in mourning clothes that are just used clothes from his cousin which were dyed black, it is even literally this trope.
• The Cinderella variant is an Invoked Trope in the Honor Harrington series, due to the Manticorian law requiring that the heir to the Crown marry a commoner. In particular, Queen Mother Angelique was initially tagged as "The Poor Little Beggar Girl" due to being not just a commoner, but part of a family of refugees who arrived on Manticore with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
  • Berry Zilwicki is a variation on the Cinderella variant, with a bit of the hard way thrown in. She starts off as a Street Urchin, is adopted by Anton Zilwicki, then gets caught in a Gambit Pileup, leading her to become the queen of the newly founded Kingdom of Torch. As her subjects are almost entirely ex-slaves, her Street Urchin background is seen as quite fitting.
• The Wheel of Time: The Cinderella version is Discussed when Mat Cauthon, a Farm Boy turned reluctant Four-Star Badass, is abruptly married to the Seanchan Empress to fulfill The Prophecy:
  "Just because a man marries someone doesn't mean he suddenly becomes bloody nobility."
  Thom and Talmanes exchanged a look.
  "Mat," Thom said. "That's actually exactly how it works. It's pretty much one of the only ways to become nobility."
• Tip from The Marvelous Land of Oz is a farm boy who runs away from his abusive guardian to find the lost princess of Oz, Ozma. Unknowingly, he's the princess. As a baby, he was given to Mombi by the Wizard so that the throne could be stolen. To avoid anyone noticing, Ozma was transformed into a boy. Tip reluctantly gets turned back and spends the rest of the series as Oz's Queen/Princess Ozma.
• The Unwilling Warlord: Sterren goes from a struggling gambler to high-level government positions, as he has noble ancestry and befriends Vond, ending up the de facto ruler of Vond's empire after he's finally Called.
• Zoya from The Grisha Trilogy and The Nikolai Duology is a rare female example of the hard way variant. She starts out as a poor peasant with a father from an opressed minority group. When she turns out to have powerful magic, she is recruited into the second army and becomes a favorite of its leader. When a civil war breaks out she chooses Alina and Prince Nikolai's side and after they win Nikolai (now the king) gives her a powerful position in the government. She becomes his closest advisor and they develop feelings for eachother. When another war breaks out she wins an important battle by turning into a dragon and is declared a Saint. Nikolai is eventually forced to abdicate due to legitamacy issues, but instead of giving the throne to a distant cousin of the royal family, he proposes an election and nominates Zoya. She wins and becomes the new Queen.
• Ranger's Apprentice:
  • Princess Cassandra becomes a Snow White type during the first arc. After the rest of her party is ambushed and killed while traveling, she takes the identity of her deceased maidservant to avoid unnecessary attention. Her situation becomes more complicated when she's captured by Skandians and sold into slavery: she can't reveal her true identity to get herself ransomed because the Skandian Oberjarl has vowed to kill her father's entire family, meaning her only chance of making it home is finding a way to escape. Though her identity is eventually exposed, Cassandra manages to negotiate a stay of execution in order to help the Skandians fend off an invasion. Once the dust has settled, the new Oberjarl personally escorts her home as a gesture of friendship and gratitude, much to her father's relief.
  • Horace ultimately becomes a Cinderella type. Originally the orphaned son of peasant farmers, he was educated and offered a chance at a better life through the generosity of Baron Arald. Horace chose to join the army and turned out to be a prodigy with a sword, which, along with his playing an instrumental role in rescuing Princess Cassandra from the Skandians, earned him a place in the royal family's elite guard at a young age. From there, he and Cassandra eventually fall in love and marry with her father's blessing.
  • Halt turns out to be a Snow White type in a later book. He was the Crown Prince of Clonmel, but his twin brother Ferris wanted the throne and made several attempts on Halt's life in their teenage years. Eventually, the older brother realized Ferris wasn't going to stop, told him he could have the throne if he wanted it so badly, and left. Decades later, the truth comes out when Ferris is assassinated, but the trope is subverted when Halt announces that he never wanted the throne anyway and gives the crown to his nephew, then washes his hands of the whole mess and gets on with his life.
  • Maddie, Horace and Cassandra's daughter, becomes a Thrushbeard-style example. She's born and raised a princess, but her headstrong, self-centered behavior drives her parents to their wit's end. Eventually, they resort to disowning her in a last-ditch effort to get through to her. That and a year of Ranger training finally convinces her to shape up, and once she proves she's learned her lesson, she's reinstated as Crown Princess.
• Darth Bane: Sera is a Cinderella type. In the first book she's a little girl living alone with her father on the remote world of Ruusan. In order to save her from being used as leverage by Darth Bane, her father has her sent out into the galaxy. By the time she reappears in book 3 she's the now-widowed princess of the planet Doab (and by all indications it was a Marry for Love arrangement, since she hates the various royal protocols she's now saddled with).

---