Many years ago, I read a short story which was basically a letter being written by a woman whom the reader soon realizes is Cinderella's "Wicked Stepmother." She feels Cinderella is now old enough, and world-wise enough, to understand and accept the unvarnished truth.
To hear the stepmother tell it: After she married Cinderella's daddy, and she and her two daughters had moved into his big house, she realized that her new husband had nasty sexual-predator tendencies. Specifically wanting to ravish attractive girls who were in early adolescence. While his first wife had been alive, their daughter had been too young for this to become a problem, but now she was reaching puberty and her body was starting to fill out, etc. (The stepmother's two biological daughters were far too homely to ever be in real danger from their new stepfather, fortunately.)
The stepmother was in a bind. She didn't have any economic resources to tide her over if she walked out. She didn't have evidence that her husband had actually raped anybody. She was supposed to be totally subject to her husband's authority unless she could prove he had, in fact, committed a terrible crime. And if she tried to warn Cinderella about the potential threat, the girl would just take it for granted that her stepmother was a wicked woman who was trying to poison the daughter's mind against her beloved father.
As a stopgap measure, the stepmother rearranged the household chores so that Cinderella spent much of her time in the kitchen, wearing shabby, frumpy clothes and getting ashes and stuff smeared over her face every day. The point was to keep her pretty face and developing figure from catching the predatory eye of her own father. But Cinderella had no clue that all this was only being done for her own good!
Then magic intervened, and Cinderella married a handsome prince, and thus was safely removed from her father's household. But now Cinderella has realized that her royal husband has some serious character flaws beneath that handsome exterior, and has reached out to her stepmother for sympathy. Which she is receiving in this letter. (I don't remember what the stepmother suggested they should do next, now that they were allies against evil men who abuse women, but I'm sure there was something.)
Note: I think I first read this story sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, but I don't remember where. For years, I thought it was one of the stories collected in Tanith Lee's paperback anthology of revisionist takes on old fairy tales: Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sister Grimmer. A while back, I found my copy of that book, and determined that while there was a dark take on the Cinderella legend in there, it wasn't the same story I have just described. So I'd like to know who really wrote the story I've summarized!