sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote 2014-05-18 06:02 pm (UTC)

but as a teenager I inhaled Stewart along with T.H. White and Sharan Newman.

Whom I do not know. What should I read of hers?

I had a vague understanding that one could not discuss the female characters in the Arthurian canon without acknowledging Mists, so I dutifully read it and took notes, but MZB's take on the canon felt so inexplicably joyless to me that I was hard-put to finish it and have never wanted to reread.

I read it when I was twelve and staying with my aunt in San Francisco. I've never re-read it; I remember that I liked Morgaine and the priestesses of Avalon, and I don't know that I had read any retelling which so explicitly stated itself a feminist revision before, but I had mixed feelings about Bradley's Merlin and I hated her treatment of Gwenhwyfar and her Christian fanaticism and the way she solved the Lancelet-Gwenhwyfar-Arthur triangle with poly and then broke it again. I think I would find it even more problematic if I re-read it now. I don't know if I should try again.

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