LAWRENCE, ANN (1942–87). British writer. Tom Ass; or, The Second Gift (1972) is a transfiguration of Apuleius. The Half-Brothers (1973),
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set in Faerie, similarly hovers uneasily between adult and children’s fantasy; the portal fantasy The Conjuror’s Box (1974) explicitly chooses the latter direction but retains a conscientious thematic sophistication. The Good Little Devil (1978) is an enterprising Christian fantasy. The Hawk of May (1980) and Merlin the Wizard (1986) are Arthurian fantasies. Beyond the Firelight (1983) and Tales from Perrault (1988) recycle familiar materials, the former consisting of Arabian fantasies. Summer’s End: Stories of Ghostly Lovers (1987) anticipated the rise of paranormal romance.
LAWRENCE, LOUISE (1943– ). Pseudonym of British writer Elizabeth Wintle Holden. Most of her work is sf (refer to HDSFL), but the couplet comprising The Wyndcliffe (1974) and Sing and Scatter Daisies (1977) is a sentimental fantasy about a young woman’s love affair with a ghost. In Cat Call (1980), the magic of an ancient cat cult is invoked against the children of a quiet village. The Earth Witch (1981) is a paranormal romance told from the male viewpoint. The Dram Road (1983) is a ghost story. The trilogy comprising Journey through Llandor (1995), The Road to Irriyan (1996), and The Shadow of Mordican (1997) is a stereotypical portal fantasy.
LAWRENCE, MARGERY (1889–1969). British writer in several genres, much of whose work in marked by sincere belief, and a strong interest, in the occult, especially ghostly manifestations. The stories assembled in Nights of the Round Table (1926), The Terraces of Night (1932), The Floating Cafe and Other Stories (1936), and Strange Caravan (1941) mingle horror and fantasy. Those in Number Seven, Queer Street (1945) and Master of Shadows (1959) comprise a series of occult detective stories. The Bridge of Wonder (1939), The Rent in the Veil (1951), The To-morrow of Yesterday (1966), and A Residence Afresh (1969) are all spiritualist fantasies, the third combined with Atlantean fantasy.
LEAR, EDWARD (1812–1888). British artist and poet, great pioneer of the limerick form and of the literary “nonsense” further developed by Lewis Carroll and W. S. Gilbert. The items initially published in The Book of Nonsense (1846), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), More Nonsense Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc. (1872), and Laughable Lyrics (1876) were recombined in many subsequent selections; the most notable fantasy items are “The Owl and the Pussy-cat,” “The Jumblies,” “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” and “The
Pobble Who Has No Toes.”
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LEE, TANITH (1947– ). British writer whose earliest works were children’s fantasies, including The Dragon Hoard (1971), Companions on the Road (1975), and The Winter Players (1976), although she soon diversified into feminized/sword and sorcery for adults in the breezily erotic The Birthgrave (1975), which was supplemented by the sequels Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978; aka Shadowfire), and Quest for the White Witch (1978). A similar trilogy comprises The Storm Lord (1976), Anackire (1983), and The White Serpent (1988). Her work for younger readers continued with The Castle of Dark (1978) and its sequel Prince on a White Horse (1982); Shon the Taken (1979); the trilogy comprising Black Unicorn (1991), Gold Unicorn (1994), and Red Unicorn (1997); and the series comprising Law of the Wolf Tower (2000; aka Wolf Tower), Wolf Star Rise (2000), Queen of the Wolves (2001; aka Wolf Queen), and Wolf Wing (2002).
In the meantime, Lee’s adult fiction ranged more widely, including excursions into sf (refer to HDSFL) and horror (refer to HDHL), an element of which was imported into the Flat Earth series, comprising Night’s Master (1978), Death’s Master (1979), Delusion’s Master (1981), Delirium’s Mistress (1986), and Night’s Sorceries (1987), as well as Volkhavaar (1977) and Day by Night (1980). Much of her subsequent fiction, including the science fantasy Sabella (1980), The Blood of Roses (1990), and the trilogy comprising Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994), involved unorthodox vampires or—as in Lycanthia (1981) and Heart-Beast (1992)—
werewolves. Its eroticism became increasingly heated and stylized, particularly in an episodic series set in the Paris-inspired city of Paradys, comprising The Book of the Damned (1988), The Book of the Beast (1988), The Book of the Dead (1991), and The Book of the Mad (1993).
Sung in Shadow (1983) is a Shakespearean fantasy. Madame Two Swords is a historical fantasy set in revolutionary France, while A Heroine of the World (1989) is set in an alternative Russia. She made use of Hindu mythology in the mosaic Tamastara; or, The Indian Nights (1984) and Elephantasm (1993), and of Near Eastern mythology in Vivia (1995). Reigning Cats and Dogs (1995) is a dark fantasy set in quasi-Dickensian London; When the Lights Go Out (1996) is similarly dark. The Secret Books of Venus series, set in an alternative 18th-century Italy, comprises Faces under Water (1998), Saint Fire (1999), A Bed of Earth (2002), and the far-futuristic Venus Preserved (2003).
White as Snow (2000) is a transfiguration of Snow White. In Mortal
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Suns (2003), an aged seer recalls her youth in a fantastic court. Piratica (2004) is an alternative history in which the heroine is determined to follow in her mother’s unorthodox footsteps. Cast a Bright Shadow (2004) launched the Lionwolf trilogy.
Lee’s short fiction is collected in Unsilent Night (1981), Cyrion (1982), Red as Blood; or, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales (1985), Dreams of Dark and Light (1986), Forests of the Night (1989), Women as Demons (1989), and Nightshades (1993).
LEE, VERNON (1856–1935). Pseudonym of British writer Violet Paget, born in France and long resident in Italy. She was the half-sister of Eugene Lee-Hamilton, as whose lectrice she served during his long inca-pacitation by neurasthenia. She followed a series of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) with a collection of Tuscan Fairy Tales (1888). “A Culture-Ghost; or, Winthrop’s Adventure” (written 1874; published 1881) appeared shortly after her literary manifesto for such endeavours, “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art”
(1880), which proposed that the supernatural can retain its proper power over the imagination only if it is allowed to remain obscure, ambiguous, and paradoxical.
The landmark collection Hauntings (1890) included the vivid erotic fantasies “Amour Dure” and “Dionea” alongside more orthodox ghost stories (refer to HDHL). A further erotic fantasy, “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers” (1889), remained unreprinted until it appeared in For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927), although the anti-romantic
“Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” (1896) was reprinted in Pope Ja-cynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1904) alongside several satirical Christian legends. Her other fantasies include The Prince of the Hundred Soups: A Puppet Show in Narrative (1883), The Legend of Madame Krasinska (1890), the fictionalized essay “A Seeker of Pagan Perfection, Being the Life of Domenico Neroni, Pictor Sacrilegus” (1891), and two other items in For Maurice, most notably the humorous/classical fantasy “The Gods and Ritter Tanhûser” (1913). The most comprehensive sampler of her work is the Ash-Tree Press omnibus Hauntings: The Supernatural Stories (2002).
LEE-HAMILTON, EUGENE (1845–1907). British writer long resident in continental Europe and North America, the half-brother of Vernon Lee.
The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903) is a graphic historical fantasy with
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Faustian elements. The Romance of the Fountain (1905) is a cautionary tale of immortality.
LEGEND. No clear boundary separates the term “legend” from “myth” or
“folktale,” but legends occupy an intermediate status, focusing on real or imaginary historical individuals of some importance rather than gods or common folk. The most considerable overlap concerns tales of legendary heroes, stories that are often promoted to the rank of “hero myths.” Christian fantasy makes much of the legends of the saints, and Arthurian fantasy is similarly based in legendary lore.
LE GUIN, URSULA K. (1929– ). U.S. writer best k
nown for sf (refer to HDSFL), although she made her debut with the sentimental fantasy
“April in Paris” (1962). The trilogy comprising A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972)—to which she later appended Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990), Tales from Earthsea (2001), and The Other Wind (2001)—is a sophisticated and highly influential immersive fantasy initially marketed for children, which demonstrated the scope that genre fantasy might contain for allegorical exploration of processes of maturation and self-development. The extent to which the Earthsea series was theoretically informed is made manifest in the essays collected in The Language of the Night (1979; rev. 1989); its several crucial contributions to the development of genre theory include “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”
(1973). More items in the same vein are included in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989).
The mosaic Orsinian Tales (1976) and the related novel Malafrena (1979) offer accounts of a nonsupernatural secondary world. The Beginning Place (1980; aka Threshold) is a portal fantasy dramatizing problems of adolescence; Gifts (2004) was also marketed for young adults. The title story of Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987) is a delicately crafted animal fantasy, and there are fantasy elements in some of the stories in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996). The series begun with Catwings (1988) consists of children’s animal fantasies featuring flying cats; Solomon Leviathan’s Nine Hundred and Thirty-first Trip around the World (1983), Fire and Stone (1989), A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back (1992). and Fish Soup (1992) are in a similar vein.
LEIBER, FRITZ (1910–1992). U.S. writer. In the mid-1930s, he wrote
“Adept’s Gambit” (first published in Night’s Black Agents, 1947), a styl-
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ish picaresque/heroic fantasy pairing the barbarian Fafhrd with the slight but clever Gray Mouser; more conventional sword and sorcery stories featuring the same characters—moved from their original historical setting to the decadent city of Lankhmar in the secondary world of Nehwon—began to appear in Unknown in 1939. The series ultimately became crucial to the evolution of the subgenre, demonstrating that it had far greater scope, in terms of wit and sophistication, than had interested Robert E. Howard. It was a vital influence on later recruits to the genre, including L. Sprague de Camp and Michael Moorcock.
A then-definitive five-volume edition, in order of the series’ internal chronology, comprises Swords and Deviltry (1970), Swords against Death (1957 as Two Sought Adventure; rev. 1970), Swords in the Mist (1968), Swords against Wizardry (1968; includes one collaboration with Harry Otto Fischer), and The Swords of Lankhmar (1968). Later additions were Swords and Ice Magic (1977) and The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988).
Leiber’s other work for Unknown included the conte philosophique
“Smoke Ghost” (1941), which laid the ideative foundations for urban fantasy; another significant item in the same vein, Conjure Wife (1943; book 1953), casually proposes that rationalism is a male prerogative and that all women are witches. An existentialist fantasy intended for Unknown appeared in an abridged version as “You’re All Alone” (1950) and in a mutilated 1953 book version before the text was restored as The Sinful Ones (1980). The Green Millennium (1953) is a light-hearted contemporary fantasy. Leiber’s short fantasies are mingled with sf and horror stories (refer to HDSFL and HDHL) in numerous collections, notably The Secret Songs (1968), Night Monsters (1969; exp. 1974), and The Ghost Light (1991). His animal fantasies are collected in Kreativ-ity for Kats and Other Feline Fantasies (1990) and Gummitch and Friends (1992). Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is a summation and extrapolation of Leiber’s cultivation of a distinctive kind of urban fantasy.
LELAND, CHARLES GODFREY (1824–1903). U.S. writer whose
casual misrepresentation of some of his poetry as translations of Italian pagan ritual, as Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (1891) had earlier done, in Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1899) made a significant contribution to subsequent scholarly fantasies. Johnnykins and the Goblins (1876) is a moralistic fantasy. The mosaic Flaxius: Leaves from the Life of an Immortal (1902) is a far-ranging historical fantasy.
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LÉVI ÉLIPHAS (1810–1875). Pseudonym of French scholarly and lifestyle fantasist Alphonse Louis Constant, whose The Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic (1854–56; tr. 1896) became the principal source book of all subsequent practical handbooks of “high magic,”
including those used by the “Rosicrucian lodges” of late 19th-century Paris, and those penned by A. E. Waite (Lévi’s English translator) and Aleister Crowley. The History of Magic (1859; tr. 1913) provided the earlier book with appropriately elaborate, but largely imaginary, historical foundations; its success probably prompted Jules Michelet to dash off La sorcière.
LEWIS, C. S. (1898–1963). British writer, much of whose fantastic fiction consists of idiosyncratic exercises in Christian apologetics. The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933; rev. 1943) tells the story of his own conversion. He placed sf (refer to HDSFL) at the service of religious fantasy in Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943; aka Voyage to Venus), although That Hideous Strength (1945)—heavily influenced by Charles Williams—completed the trilogy by veering into metaphysical fantasy involving Merlin; an uncompleted fourth volume, published as the title piece of The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977) offers horrific visions of a parallel world. The Screwtape Letters (1942) takes the form of letters written by a worldly-wise devil to his callow nephew. The Great Divorce (1945) is an enterprising afterlife fantasy.
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), is a poignant classical fantasy recycling the tale of Cupid and Psyche.
Lewis’s phenomenally successful children’s fantasy series the Chronicles of Narnia, comprising The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and his Boy (1954), The Magician’s Nephew (1955), and The Last Battle (1956), conceals its message artfully. Some juvenilia were assembled in Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (1985), edited by Walter Hooper. Lewis’s contributions to the Inklings’ discussions of the significance and literary utility of mythical and fantastic materials are reflected in An Experiment in Criticism (1961) and Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966).
LEWIS, MATTHEW GREGORY (1775–1818). British writer best
known as the author of the lurid Gothic horror novel The Monk; a Romance (1796) (refer to HDHL). He was a prolific writer of stage melodramas, some of which—including One o’Clock! or, The Knight and the
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Wood Daemon (1811)—are fantasies, as are “Amorassan; or, The Spirit of the Frozen Ocean” and a few other items in Romantic Tales (4 vols., 1808; abridged in one vol. 1838), most of which are adaptations of works by other hands. Lewis’s translation of Anthony Hamilton’s The Four Facardins included his own extensive continuation as well as a translation of one by M. de Levis. The first volume of his collection of ballads Tales of Wonder (2 vols., 1801)—which includes some original compositions—was reprinted by Henry Morley in Tales of Terror and Wonder (1887) with a collection of parodies that had been falsely advertised as Lewis’s work. The anthology was influential, largely by virtue of including translations of J. W. Goethe’s “The Erl-King,” Gottfried Bürger’s “Leonora” and “The Wild Huntsmen,” and early works
by Walter Scott.
LEWIS, WYNDHAM (1882–1957). U.S.-born British writer and critic.
With Ezra Pound, he edited Blast, the Review of the Great English Vortex (1914–15), where he published his exemplary Vorticist drama The Enemy of the Stars (book 1932), a fantastic extravaganza in which Hanp—symbolic of violent and dull-witted Mankind—battles Arghol,
the wise and rational spirit of intellectualism. The enterprising and highly idiosyncratic Dantean fantasy The Childermass (1928) launched a project collectively titled The Human Age; it w
as never completed, although two further parts— Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta—
were appended to it when it was reprinted in a two-volume edition of 1955, along with a synoptic account of the unwritten fourth section, The Trial of Man. His artwork inspired Naomi Mitchison’s hallucinatory fantasy Beyond the Limit.
LIFESTYLE FANTASY. All “lifestyles” act out psychological fantasies, but most are thoroughly naturalistic. The term is employed here to describe those lifestyles that embrace and enact some kind of magic, mysticism, or calculated madness. As with scholarly fantasy, it is impossible to make distinctions between lifestyle fantasists who are sincere believers and those who are merely poseurs; the term does not discrim-inate between devout satanists and playactors whose black masses are purely theatrical affairs, nor between practitioners of alchemy, astrology, or witchcraft who are mere confidence tricksters and those who have absolute faith in the authenticity of their practices.
A significant English model was the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, established by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1752 at Medmenham Abbey,
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although the Hell-Fire Club, whose name it inherited in popular gossip, was actually an earlier social gathering that met at the George and Vul-ture Inn in London—an establishment with another claim to fame, its appearance in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. The rituals of such societies lent impetus to the Gothic revival in literature and exercised a powerful influence on the most conspicuous lifestyle fantasists of the 19th century, who laid the foundations of the occult revival. The Byronic pose, which remained enormously fashionable long after Edward Bulwer-Lytton claimed to have killed it off by championing a brighter form of dandyism, extended into lifestyle fantasy in its more extreme versions, echoing in the impostures of such decadent diabolists as Count Stenbock. Other 19th-century lifestyle fantasists who provided considerable fodder for literary fantasists included mesmerists, spiritualists, cheiromancers, theosophists, and Rosicrucians. Many prominent
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 41
