The Arthurian legends were old hat in the literary world until that doyen of fantasy novelists, the late Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999), turned them inside out and upside down by adding a hefty dash of pagan feminism and a bucketful of faultless historical facts to come up with the spellbinding ‘Avalon’ series which, like the very myths on which they were based, continue to be woven even after her demise.

Bradley, a twice married mother of three, was a farmer’s daughter from Albany, New York who, after battling through the Great Depression, much of which she spent with her nose in any books she could lay her hands on, began writing seriously when she was a newly-wed 19-year-old.

She sold her first story 3 long years later just as she moved to Texas where her husband worked for the railways. A science fiction fan since childhood, she attended science fiction conventions, publishing a fanzine ‘Astra’s Tower’ and even managed to take classes at Hardin Simmons University in Abilene from where she eventually graduated with a B.A. in 1964.

An incredibly prolific writer from the word ‘go’, she was soon making a reasonable income from the sales of short stories and novels penned under a variety of names, the latter due to the somewhat questionable nature of their contents as 1950s America was far from being liberal-minded as it is today.

In 1962, encouraged by friend and editor Don Wollheim, Bradley penned the first of her famous ‘Darkover’ series which by 1992 ran to 19 inter-related novels some of which were co-authored by writers including Julian May, Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey.

Churning out two books a year during the 1960s and 1970s, Bradley wrote dozens of science fiction and fantasy books alongside the Darkover series. She often started work at 5 a.m. and completed 60 pages before breakfast!

A compulsive writer, her first marriage failed in 1964 and she married science fiction fan Walter Breen and moved to Berkley, California where she once more managed to attend university whilst bringing up her children, running a house, writing, editing and devoting part of her time to the Society for Creative Anachronism which she helped found along with fellow fantasy writer and close friend Diana L. Paxon.

A move to New York in 1967 served to sharpen her already noteworthy literary abilities but Berkley was a magnet she couldn’t resist and moved back there to live in what can only be described as a small community of like-minded writers in 1973. She separated from her second husband 6 years later.

Fantasy with a female focus grew to be an integral part of Bradley’s literary leanings and it should come as no surprise to learn that ancient Goddess cults played an increasingly important role in her life, to the point that she declared herself a ‘neopagan’ in the early 1980s. It is reported, however, that she reverted to Christianity in later years.

It was at the height of her neopagan involvement that she wrote her most magnificent book The Mists of Avalon (Ballantine Books, 1982) which spent three months on The New York Times’ bestsellers list and swept the literary world by storm.

Mists, as it is affectionately known, is a huge 800-page extravaganza told from a female point of view and in which Queen Gwynhefar comes across as a neurotic acrophobic lusting after Lancelot; Morgaine of the Fairies as a priestess of the ‘old religion’; King Arthur as a somewhat immature monarch caught between the forces of Christianity and the Goddess; and Merlin, in his later days, as a likeable character struggling to balance the scales between the old world and the new. Reincarnation, which is taken for granted by the central characters, thickens the plot.

Strangely enough, Mists turned out to be the last book in the Avalon series although it was written first. It was followed in 1983 by Web of Light and Web of Darkness, both of which recount the final days of Atlantis from which the ancestors of Avalon originated. The Forest House (1993) co-authored with Diana L. Paxon follows on from this, then Lady of Avalon (1997) and Priestess of Avalon (2000) again with Paxon.

Since Bradley’s death Paxon has written three more books in the series so far: Ancestors of Avalon (2004), Ravens of Avalon (2007) and Sword of Avalon (2009).

Despite this change of authors the series continues to be as addictive as ever… once picked up there’s just no putting it down!