selenak: (0)
selenak ([personal profile] selenak) wrote 2012-03-03 05:20 pm (UTC)

I read The Mists of Avalon when I was 13, which turned out to be perfect. It was my discovery of feminism, so to speak, of positive presentation of non-straight sexuality, and of the fact you can tell myths in different ways (previously the only Arthurian stories I was familiar with were Hal Forster's Prince Valiant cartoons and some films). I think if I had read it ten or twenty years later, I might have responded quite differently, been annoyed by the simple reverse of black and white when it came to christianity vs paganism, but at 13 it was the thunderbolt from the sky. Then I devoured the Darkover novels (such as were available in German at the time, some of her other sci fi novels and the Catch Trap. By the time I was 17, I had worked up the courage for a fan letter, for which I got a very nice reply. And then in my 20s I started to lose interest, and I think that must have been when she stopped writing the novels and they were co-written or written by her secretary anyway. But she was definitely one of the defining writers of my teenage years.

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