Just Ella

Just Ella is a 1999 fantasy novel by American author Margaret Peterson Haddix. A feminist reimagining of the classic fairy tale of Cinderella, it follows fifteen-year-old Ella who struggles to find happiness after she ends up in a dead-end marriage with Prince Charming. The story contextualizes Ella within her patriarchal aristocratic society, illuminating how even the most successful women in this kind of system feel disillusioned and frustrated as they internalize their oppression. The novel touches on many ways in which patriarchal elements manifest, ranging from domestic relationships and marital tensions, to feminine solidarity and one’s conception of selfhood.

The novel begins after Ella Brown of Fridesia is engaged to Prince Charming. Ella, now known publicly as Princess Cynthiana Eleanora, has moved into the royal palace and is busy getting ready for the wedding. Part of this task involves refining her identity as a princess. She is highly unfamiliar with what it means to be royalty, having grown up with her abusive stepmother and stepsisters. Moreover, she has figured out that there is not much to the Prince beyond his power and privilege. Ella strongly dislikes her new mentor, Madame Bisset, who is of the belief that noble women should not have their own power. She befriends her history teacher, Jed Reston, and a young servant Mary. Jed reveals that rumors have been circulating regarding Ella’s origins and that they involve a pumpkin coach and fairy godmother. In response, she tells him what really happened.



After the tragic death of her father, her stepmother, Lucille, and two stepsisters, Griselda and Corimunde, had essentially enslaved Ella. When the women learned that the king and queen were throwing a royal ball, they forbade Ella from going and overloaded her with chores. Ella defied them by going anyway, hoping to make connections through which she could find more gainful employment and build a better life. She wore her mother’s wedding dress and won a pair of glass slippers in a bet with a local glassblower. She did not ride in a magical pumpkin coach or benefit from the goodwill of a fairy godmother but worked hard to make it to the ball. On the night of the event, a kind coachman drove her to the palace. Though the prince immediately took an interest in her, she was forced to run to her free ride home at midnight, losing a slipper on the way. After the ball, the prince called for a great shoe fitting in order to find Ella.

After telling Jed this story, Ella discovers that Jed knew the truth all along, for he had assisted the prince during the shoe fitting. Suspecting that Jed is only being friendly with her to gain support for his endeavor to build a refugee camp for people impacted by the Sualan war, Ella stops speaking to him. Eventually, Ella considers calling off the marriage. She learns that she was selected not because the prince feels that they are truly in love, but because the royal family highly values beauty. When she finally requests to break the engagement, she is put in the dungeon indefinitely until she retracts her request. Madame Bisset hires the guard Quog to ensure that she cannot escape.

Mary helps Ella dig her way through the wall behind the toilet system. She escapes to Jed’s new refugee camp, which he was granted permission to build just before Ella’s arrest so he wouldn’t notice her imprisonment. When Ella arrives, Jed proposes to her. Ella asks him to wait for her to figure out how to break things off with Prince Charming and her stepmother. At the refugee camp, she becomes a medic, then takes up the camp’s leadership role when Jed leaves for the palace to take up his deceased father’s role.



Ella receives a letter from Jed, explaining that Madame Bisset covered up Ella’s flight from the castle by putting one of her stepsisters in her place. The prince took Corimunde from home shortly afterward, and now all of Ella’s family lives at the palace. Jed writes that he does not want to fill his father’s role and might try to escape. Still, he decides to stay at the palace for the time being, to try to help end the Sualan war. At the end of the novel, Ella realizes that she loves Jed. Independent at last, she ponders what the future holds.