City of Sorcery is organized around the archetypal theme of the quest.

Here, the goal is a city of promise and perfection. In the prologue to City of Sorcery Bradley cites Talbot Mundy's The Devil's Guard as her model, but the theme is common in epic and heroic literature, and is one Bradley herself used in an Arthurian romantic epic, The Mists of Avalon (1982), where the final approach of the Grail unites the good and evil, female and male. Identifying a city as the goal of the quest is familiar in classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature, such as Compostella's City of the Sun, William Morris's Well at the World's End (1896), and William Blake's the golden and bejewelled Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion (1818).

The concept of a perfected sisterhood, or a community of women united in a struggle that transcends individual differences and changes the...