See Cinderella’s stepmother in a new light in ‘Lady Tremaine’ excerpt (exclusive)

Cinderelly, Cinderelly, night and day it’s Cinderelly…

But what about Lady Tremaine, Cinderella’s supposedly “evil” stepmother? That’s what author Rachel Hochhauser wonders in Lady Tremaine, a new novel coming to shelves in March 2026.

The novel reimagines the story of Cinderella through the eyes of its most reviled character, here dubbed Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley. Widowed twice, Etheldreda is left to care for her own two children, her haughty stepdaughter, and a peregrine falcon. Not to mention the manor hall that she calls home, which may look ornate from the outside but is crumbling on the inside.

Etheldreda knows that respectability is the only currency she has to trade on, believing that secure marriages for her daughters will prove her lifeboat. A royal ball offers the chance she needs, prompting Etheldreda to risk her secrets and limited resources in pursuit of an invitation — only to have her hopes fulfilled by her stepdaughter.

As the engagement proceeds at dizzyingly rapid speed, Etheldreda discovers a sordid secret within the royal family, leaving her to choose between the security she’s yearned for and the well-being of her thankless stepdaughter.

Lady Tremaine turns the beloved fairy tale on its head for a new examination of motherhood, the depths of a mother’s love, and a celebration of women brave enough to make their own fortunes. Lady Tremaine is Cinderella as it has never been told before.

Entertainment Weekly has your first look at the cover below. Read on for an exclusive excerpt from the second chapter of the novel.

Chapter Two

Before there were half-moons of dirt beneath my nails, there were jewels on my fingers. And before there were lines on my face, there was joy. But all that was long ago. I’ve sold most of my jewels. There is, alas, no price on joy. But if joy were a commodity, I’d trade all I have—all that’s left of it—for my daughters. Rosie. Matilda. (Here a few images come to mind: Twin braids. A freckle on a calf. Matilda’s scar. The long shadows cast by a child’s eyelashes. Minute details that come to represent a whole being.) 

My name is Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley. The man in the woods thought I, mud splattered and soiled, was a peasant. I have been familiar with the loam of the earth since I was a girl, but he was wrong.

Our family manor was on the outskirts of the King’s territory, far from most of the nobility and day-to-day machinations of court, its customs, and norms. I grew up with little knowledge of those formalities, in a household of men. I passed most of my time in the kitchen, stealing rolls and tarts and apples, in the stables, feeding the same rolls and tarts and apples to the livestock, or outside, assisting the boys and the men. 

As a brewer, my father spent his days busied by every manner of task—boiling wort, cleaning barrels, keeping records. He and my brother often involved themselves in the needs of the house and our land, stepping in to smith or woodwork. At both the brewery and at home, I was allowed to observe, or, less frequently, help. If something were to break or go wrong, instead of calling for a specialist, my father would first turn to his hands. Always, he said, you start with the tools you have. Through him, I learned how to manage a home and a cellar: how to salt or smoke a successful hunt’s bounty, how to prune a cherry tree, how to rack barrels without breaking your back, how to mix clay, soil, straw, and dung into daub and apply it across the stable’s wattles. When I wasn’t trailing after my father, I explored the woods around our home, and put my hands and feet in the river, and made tiny pretend creatures from twigs and leaves. The days of my girlhood were dusty, dirty, sooty, and sweaty. Above all, they were happy.

On my twelfth birthday, a tutor named Agatha—a severe woman with pox scars and beautiful red hair who covered her smell of sour milk with a pungent lilac water—was hired to oversee my education: namely to instill me with knowledge of the manners and etiquette that would be necessary for marriage. It was through Agatha, a bit belatedly, that I was taught the formalities and customs of genteel women, a counterbalance to my years spent shadowing my father. 

If I had paid close attention, I might have seen some of the warnings. Rosy-cheeked girls who wed and watched their skin turn gray. Women in our village who married men so far away we never saw them again. Swollen lips and bruised eyes—echoes of violence, as ancient as man himself—that made themselves known at the market and local taverns.

But the stories we passed and murmured about were what happened to the girls who had not married. There were women that fell into ruin. Spinsters that lived at the mercy of unknown relatives. In my hamlet, an unwed maidservant was once discovered to be with child, and then, later, beat to death by an unknown hand—purple at the belly, a thrashing meant to induce miscarriage—so that she could not, would not, name the father. A different year, a pregnant woman had wandered into our township. Alone and in labor. She could not walk. She crawled in the dirt. And no one helped her, for to help her would be to assume responsibility. The constable threw her convulsing body over the back of a horse and carted her to county lines. I’d once heard a story of a widow whose deceased left her and her daughter nothing but the choice of prostitution. Both of their bodies were later found in the shallow stream where people did their washing, limbs bloody, faces forgotten, except where the daughter’s forehead had been branded with a hot iron. Each telling gruesome. Whispered about. But without a sense of surprise, or horror: these instances were recounted and incanted as warning.

We women were born and bred to expect marriage, and it all happened when we were too young to know better. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen: so young a girl’s first breath was still a part of the earth’s atmosphere. So young you pinched your cheeks to make them pink, you strung flowers in your hair, you denuded daisies whispering of love, you believed in the power of the moon and in the twinkling of the stars as if all of nature and its tidal pulls would take care of you, so blind to the truth of what lay ahead.

The only being that defied the ancient standard—the standard of me, first, me, only, I, I, me—was a mother. A mother, in the bones of her bones, was not in balance. She gave, without ending. She thought not as an I but as a we and more often it was you, you, you, my darling, you. A mother protects, tipping scales, weighing odds, defying the system. And I did not have one. 

I was three when she passed, and sometimes I think I can remember her. Long fingers, holding my face, humming, dark hair, memories as shapeless as a dream itself. Is this so different from the twin braids, the freckle, the scar, the shadow of an eyelash that, when held together, represent my own children? I was never certain if I confused the recollections with the details I begged my older brother for, somehow twining his remembering with my own. My only tangible evidence was a necklace my mother had left behind—a cameo carved into shell that depicted her countenance. It felt fitting that all I had was her outline, as if her details were not meant for me. The little I knew about my mother was that she was a mother, and it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I could understand and inhabit this, or truly feel any connection between the two of us.

I have wondered at the immeasurable ways my life would be different if she had lived longer. Perhaps I would have known more, when knowing would have been useful. Perhaps I would have expected some of the pain, some of the blood, that goes in hand with living. Perhaps what is hard in me, what can be cruel, would be softer. But I think, above all else, she might have stopped me from marrying so young. Or at least better prepared me.

A marriage can be violent, even if a man is not. By the time my daughters were grown, there were no men left in my house. Though we were not starving, we needed food. Though we lived in a grand hall, we were not well off. The scant means we did have—what I’d gotten from selling off piece by piece of furniture, stripping the walls of paintings, trading necklaces and brooches jewel by jewel—went toward maintaining the upright charade Agatha had drilled into me through bloodied knuckles and bruised arms: the appearance that all was well.

Copyright 2026 by Rachel Hochhauser, Courtesy of St. Martin’s Press