In this article, it is shown how authors of fairy tale retellings have incorporated ideas of feminist literary criticism into a fictional form. As such, these retellings display the tension between the pedagogic and aesthetic aspects of all children's literature. Jane Yolen's "Sleeping Ugly" is chosen as a case study: although it can be argued that the book serves as a mouthpiece for the ideology of the emancipation movement formulated in Marcia Lieberman's key text "Some Day My Prince Will Come," it is suggested that "Sleeping Ugly" teaches children to read against a text's authority and as such undermines its own didactic potential.