RSSThe Mystery of Tanith Lee
Oct 16
People Authors, Books, Tanith Lee Comments Off
For someone as prolific as author Tanith Lee, she is surprisingly invisible in the public eye. Her Wikipedia entry confirms that she wrote at least 54 novels, but there is a scandalous lack of detail for the usually reputable and thorough encyclopedia. The lack of recent information, the lack of a definitive biography of an established author, the lack of any speck of her work in the mainstream conscious is a strange mystery.
There is not a complete dearth of information. I know Lee was born in 1947, not she is yet sixty years old, and also that she is still writing (her website http://www.tanithlee.com/ confirms as much.) Her newest novels are listed on amazon.com but quite simply, she does not exist inside American mainstream bookstores.
I’m with you, that last sentence is the key. She is a British writer, so that might contributory, and she has been swept out of the mainstream, which is not the same as saying she has become invisible but we seem to have arrived at the same result.
My introduction to Tanith Lee was the Red as Blood collection of stories that recast Grimm fairytales in the sinister and seductive style of Lee. Her writing is decidedly twisted, and that is a compliment. Many of her best tales start with an enchanted young girl, who is twisted inside out. In Red as Blood, Snow White turns out to be the real wicked one, not the Queen and Sleeping Beauty is no charming princess herself. Her characters invariably walk the line between antagonist and protagonist, and the reader never quite knows what evil lurks in the heart of her people.
For instance, in the novel Louisa the Poisoner (1996), we know pretty much off the bat that Louisa is not such a nice person. She’s calculating, shrewd and manipulative. Louisa escapes the captivity of her aunt’s home in the March Mire (by poisoning her, no less) armed with the conceit of an aristocratic lady and a vial of potent poison. She finds her way quickly into the household of Lord Maskullance, and secures his affections. Assured of her share of his fortune when he dies, she quickly goes about killing off his other heirs.
Lee pays attention to detail in exquisite fashion, spending her time on describing a room minutely, giving us intimate feel of being there. She also doesn’t shy away from the grim, the deceitful and the downright horrific moments either. She delightedly describes each of Louisa’s attempts to destroy members of the household, some successful, some not. But has Louisa done all this without Lord Maskullance’s notice, or with his explicit permission?
The ambiguity of good and bad is a regular theme in Lee’s fantasy works. It is an interesting draw, sometimes the bad guy wins. We too often live in a society of happy endings, and it was refreshing to come across a writer who does not live by those rules, even if you close the book feeling a little wicked for having read it.
Such stories are just a portion of Lee’s work, but the template of hers that I am most familiar with. I am little disappointed that it is so damn hard to find the body of her writing. Even more frustrating is that this woman simply does not exist on the web. Every page I found was mostly a bibliography. I did stumble on an interview from 1998 where Lee talks about her invisibility as an author. “If anyone ever wonders why there’s nothing coming from me, it’s not my fault. I’m doing the work. The indication is that I’m not writing what people want to read, but I never did.” from Locus Magazine, April 1998
Although in my humble opinion, someone who is going to pick up an Anne Rice novel could do just as well, perhaps better, with Tanith Lee. So I bought myself a copy of one her most famous series of novels, The Secret Books of Paradys. If you can’t find the book out on the shelves, you can borrow my copy.
