Avalon: Books: The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon retells the story of King Arthur from the point of view of the female characters. It is divided into four "books", each focusing on a different woman, with interpolations from the point of view of the main character, Morgaine.

When Marion announced that she intended to write an Arthurian novel I was dubious. Between The Once and Future King, and Sword at Sunset, the two major treatments of that subject published during the preceding period, it seemed to me that there was nothing new left to say. There were times during the writing when Marion herself wondered if she could bring off the project, but perhaps her greatest gift as a writer was the ability to seize the right moment to say something that people desperately needed to hear. The decision to focus on the stories of the female characters, which most previous treatments of the legend had left untold, was a stroke of genius, and the fact that this was the Arthurian legend, the most enduring myth in English--perhaps in European--literature, meant that it reached a far larger audience than any of Marion's genre fiction had done before.

When Marion began work, I loaned her my texts from graduate courses in Arthurian literature and shared what I knew. After that, all I could do was hold her hand during periods of discouragement and cheer when the story began to flow. Fairly early in the writing, she realized that historical accuracy would conflict with the tale she needed to write, but the story of King Arthur has always existed, at least partially, in a realm beyond history, and so her liberties were justified. Some years ago I was discussing the book with John and Caitlín Matthews, the well-known writers on Celtic Shamanism. We ruefully agreed that there was no evidence for a religious system such as Marion described in what we know of Celtic religion. However, they pointed out that Marion had hit upon a number of concepts which were similar to those expressed in an unpublished essay on the legend by the famous occult author Dion Fortune. Thus, although The Mists of Avalon is not historical, it holds elements of spiritual truth that transcend history.

Her editor, Judy Lynn Del Rey of Ballantine Books, also played a part in the book's success. For years, economic necessity had forced Marion to write swiftly, with no time for revision. Judy Lynn's comment on the first draft of Mists was that there was nothing wrong with it, "except the beginning, the middle, and the end." So Marion rewrote and expanded. Judy Lynn then proceeded to use her considerable expertise to get the book reviewed in The New York Times. The reviewer loved it, and word-of-mouth took care of the rest. The book has been in print continuously since its publication, and has sold so well in trade paperback that the publishers have never seen any need to print a mass-market version.

For an essay in which Marion discusses her treatment of Christianity in the book, see her essay "Thoughts on Avalon"

This page was last modified on Friday, 24 August, 2007 at 23:15:46.
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"The symbol is nothing; the reality is all." -- Marion Zimmer Bradley.