Of the various great matters of Western literature—the story of Troy, the legend of Charlemagne, the tales of Araby—none has more profoundly captured the imagination of English civilization than the saga of its own imperial dream, the romance of King Arthur and the Round Table…. The story of Arthur traditionally begins as the story of male lust….

Most readers know the story of King Arthur; however, Marion Zimmer Bradley, in Mists of Avalon has written an especially vivid, unorthodox version of this romantic tale. Bradley's narrator is Morgaine, a Druid priestess, and her England is populated by those who worship the Lady (the Earth Mother) and those few who are turning to the harsher, more intolerant Christianity—a religion which equates chastity with good and sex with evil. The story centers on the struggle between the two religions a...

With The Mists of Avalon the reader enjoys a new perspective: that of the women [in the Arthurian legends]…. Furthermore, the development of the novel depends not on a contest between good and evil, Christianity and paganism, nor on the characters themselves so much as it does on the tension that frowns as a new culture overshadows and obliterates an older one. Thus Marion Zimmer Bradley has written of a present urgency in a mythical setting, and written magnificently at that! (p. 2) Perhaps the most...