The Courtship of Mr Lyon

The story

A merchant, newly ruined by his lawyers that very morning, breaks down in the snow on his way home when his old car sticks fast in a rut, and takes shelter at a mysterious mansion whose gates swing open of their own accord. Inside, a fire is already lit and food laid out, yet the only living creature he meets is a gentle brown-and-white spaniel who leads him about; the owner, the Beast, is a lion who walks upright, wears a rich smoking jacket and hides his face. Leaving, and finding a single perfect white rose in the frozen garden, the merchant plucks it for his daughter Beauty, the one modest gift she had asked for; the Beast erupts from the snow in a roaring fury at the theft, then relents on one condition, that Beauty should come and dine with him. She goes out of love and duty, arriving at the house of a creature she has every reason to dread. The shy, lonely Beast, who can barely meet her eye, is charmed by her, and offers to set his lawyers to recover her father’s fortune through the courts if she will only stay with him a while.

Beauty travels to London with her restored father and slips into the life of a pampered society girl, hoarding her own reflection in every mirror, growing a little vain and letting the weeks slide by until she has all but forgotten her promise to return. The Beast, pining for her in his emptying house, simply begins to die. It is the spaniel who comes for her, arriving bedraggled and thin, its coat matted with London soot, to fetch her back before it is too late; Beauty catches the last train through the snow and reaches the mansion to find the Beast ‘sadly diminished’ and close to death, lying in a cold, neglected room. Her tears fall on his shaggy face and her declared love transforms him: the cruel-looking claws she has always feared draw back into their pads, and he becomes a man, though a strikingly ordinary one, with an unkempt mane of hair and a boxer’s broken nose rather than a prince’s beauty. They marry, and the story closes on the almost suspiciously domestic image of Mr and Mrs Lyon walking in the spring garden while the old spaniel, now sleek and content, dozes on the grass.

A closer look

Reworking Beauty and the Beast: the third person as a cage

Carter draws here on the polite eighteenth-century fairy tale of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, and on Jean Cocteau’s dreamlike 1946 film, both of which she knew well. Marina Warner notes that Carter wanted us to ‘feel what it is like to be Beauty from the inside’, yet the striking choice here is that she narrates this Beauty from the outside, in the third person. Chris Power puts it sharply: the name Beauty ‘diminishes her to a single attribute of male-determined value’, and the third-person telling ‘robs her of agency’. Where the narrator of the title story speaks for herself, this heroine is spoken about, watched and arranged, and the reader is kept at the same respectful distance as everyone else who admires her.

That distance is the story’s quiet method. Beauty is first seen ‘made all of snow’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), pure and passive and slightly unreal, and the road outside her window lies ‘white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), an image that pictures her future marriage as blank fabric waiting to be cut. Her father, who loves her, nonetheless keeps her as a possession, ‘his beauty, his girl-child, his pet’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), and she goes to the Beast feeling herself ‘Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon). Set against the fierce first-person Justine-and-Juliette contrast Carter draws across the two Beast tales, this Beauty is the demure, obedient figure, whose consent is really a form of dutifulness.

The danger of the happy ending

Carter is careful not to let us dismiss Beauty as merely weak. ‘Do not think she had no will of her own’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), the narrator insists, and the sentence is doing something clever: the very need to deny it exposes how nearly absent her will is, since her choices are all made for someone else’s sake. The most sceptical touch comes in London, where comfort curdles into vanity and Beauty learns, ‘at the end of her adolescence, how to be a spoiled child’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon). This is not the language of a heroine growing into freedom; it is the language of a woman being domesticated, taught by wealth to prize her own reflection, and Carter lets the near-death of the Beast register as the cost of that self-absorption. There is a pointed irony in it: the girl first drawn as pure and passive learns, in the city, to gaze at herself as fondly as any man might gaze at her, so that vanity and objectification turn out to be two sides of one coin. The happy ending arrives, but the story has quietly asked whether being loved into a marriage is the same as being liberated.

The sympathetic Beast and a transformation that deflates romance

The Beast is the tenderest male figure in the collection so far, and Carter builds real pathos around his loneliness. He insists on his difference, ‘I am the Beast, and you must call me Beast’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), and the narrator holds that difference open: ‘a lion is a lion and a man is a man’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), a creature of another order entirely, with ‘agate eyes’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon) full of a sadness that moves her. He speaks ‘in the diffuse, rumbling purr with which he conversed’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), shy to the point of fearing refusal. Merja Makinen reads this reciprocity, the awe felt on both sides, as the key to Carter’s beast marriages: the lion kisses Beauty’s hand, and she kisses his, so that the transaction is founded on something like equality rather than conquest.

The transformation itself is the story’s wittiest stroke. When Beauty’s love turns the Beast human, he is ‘no longer a lion in her arms but a man’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), yet not a fairy-tale prince: he has a broken nose ‘such as the noses of retired boxers’, a battered, ordinary face. Carter deflates the expected magical reward, delivering a plausible husband rather than a dream, which cuts against the very romance the tale seems to grant. Whether the ending is a true meeting of equals or a return to the domestic order that the collection elsewhere attacks is a question worth holding open, and it is exactly the tension ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ will answer by refusing to make its heroine human at all.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘made all of snow’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)	Metaphor	Establishes Beauty as pure, passive and faintly unreal; the purity is also fragility, an identity that can melt or be shaped by others.
‘the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)	Simile, foreshadowing	Turns the landscape into wedding fabric waiting to be cut, picturing marriage as her blank, predetermined future.
‘his beauty, his girl-child, his pet’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)	Tricolon, possessive pronouns	The father’s love is also ownership; the repeated ‘his’ shows Beauty passed between men as property before the Beast is ever met.
‘Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)	Metaphor, religious diction	Casts her visit as a willing sacrifice; her virtue is defined by readiness to be given away for her father’s sake.
‘how to be a spoiled child’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)	Irony	Wealth domesticates rather than frees Beauty; comfort teaches vanity, complicating any reading of the ending as growth.
‘no longer a lion in her arms but a man’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)	Transformation, bathos	The magical reward is a plain, broken-nosed man, deflating fairy-tale romance and hinting at a marriage of equals rather than a dream.