The period 1690 to 1709 saw the emergence of a new literary genre dominated by women writers: the contes de fées. Allison Stedman argues that this genre contributed to the transformation of the oral eloquence of salon conversation into a series of socio-literary interactions in which the exchange of texts created literary communities of readers and writers (Rococo Fiction in France, 2013). The meta- and paratextual framing of tales by d'Aulnoy, Lhéritier and Murat illustrate the complex strategies of self-representation used by seventeenth-century women writers. This paper argues that they use different strategies of displacement to reinvent oral storytelling traditions for the literary audience of the late seventeenth-century salon. These strategies of disguise articulate a theory of female authorship that defends the creativity of women writers and their contribution to the seventeenth-century literary field.