ABSTRACT
What is wrong with this story? Why has this story, or variations of it, survived for hundreds of years? And why should we, as feminists and lawyers, care? I propose to answer these questions with a reading of the story of Beauty and the Beast which marries the fairy tale to the legal stories surrounding equitable intervention into non-commercial third party secured transactions in order to argue that the present state of the law reflects none of the possible ‘happily ever after’ endings. I shall consider the place of fairy tales in our lives, then draw together feminist theorising about rhetoric, allegory and myth-making in postmodern times with similar analyses of legal stories. I want to use these thoughts as a basis for evaluating possible legal alternatives in the classic situation where typically a woman, who may be a wife (Barclays Bank v O’Brien1), a mother (Clark Boyce v Mouat2), or a lover (Massey v Midland Bank3), agrees to security being placed over the family home to support credit being offered to a failing businessman.
