The Extraordinary Imagination of Tanith Lee

I’m not sure when I first came across a book by Tanith Lee. My first real memory of seeing one is likely from the 1980s – Sabella. I remember standing in the local bookshop, a family-run business founded in the 19th century. Sabella was sitting on a shelf with a cover picture of a young woman wearing a pendant. Curious, I picked it up to look at it. I didn’t buy it then. I filed it away for future reference. Now she’s the most represented author on my bookshelves.

Tanith Lee was the author of over 90 novels and 300 short stories. She wrote in multiple genres – fantasy, science fiction, horror, historical, and even a crime novel. She won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many more.

Her lush, imaginative fiction ranged from children’s stories, to young adult novels (before YA was even a category), right through to adult fiction.

And if that wasn’t enough, she wrote two episodes of the cult British science-fiction series, Blake’s 7.

Tanith Lee never had any children. Her husband John Kaine says, in the opening to Night’s Nieces, a collection of stories by women writers influenced by Lee, that children would have taken away too much writing time. But she would happily have given birth to cats.

Lee met Kaine, an artist and writer, in 1987 and they married in 1992. Sadly, Lee died in 2015 from breast cancer at the age of 67. But, in her long career stretching over more than forty years, she accomplished more than the vast majority of writers ever do.

Lee’s childhood and upbringing

Lee was born in 1947. Her parents were professional dancers, which led to the family moving around a lot for work. Mildly dyslexic, she learned to read at the age of eight with the help of her father and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. By nine she was already writing. But she found school and homework an interruption to ‘the fantasy projection of my inner world.’

In spite of reading late, she managed to pass her eleven-plus exam and entered grammar school. There three teachers inspired her – the history teacher, the English teacher, and the religion teacher. She would later describe them as her intellectual heroines. They were so interested in their subjects, they were able to pass on that interest, something that would influence Lee in her own writing.

Likewise, her father introduced her to Shakespeare and retold the different tales with genuine passion and love for the subject. Picking up on this, she went on to read them herself. Meanwhile her mother told her fairy stories, but, in her mother’s version, the prince would marry the wicked witch, which is just the sort of thing you’d expect in Lee’s later reworking of fairy tales.

After leaving school, she went on to study at Croydon Art College, dropping out after a year. Then she had a string of jobs, including assistant librarian.

Early success

Her first story was privately printed, and her children’s book The Dragon Hoard was sold when she was only 21. But it was The Birthgrave, a fantasy novel rejected by UK publishers, that propelled her to full-time professional writer when it was purchased by the US publisher DAW Books.

In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer.

It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.

Tanith Lee in interview with Tabula Rasa

Writing method

Lee wrote by hand. She described it as almost writing in a zigzag, across and down. Her mother typed up her early stories, before she later typed them up herself. She claimed that no one (other than her mother presumably) could read her writing. Sometimes when Lee went back to type up her longhand manuscript, even she couldn’t read some bits herself.

She wrote fast. On average, one hundred pages a month and a full novel in longhand in about four months. But she told a shocked Stan Nicholls that her vampire SF novella, Sabella, was written in nine days. Unfortunately, she was blocked for one and a half days, otherwise Sabella would have been finished sooner!

To put this in context, the finished book is around 150 pages.

She also mentioned in a 1998 interview in Locus Magazine that she used to throw out her old handwritten manuscripts, but now at age 50 she kept them in case anyone was ever interested in seeing them.

When it came to research, Lee would read books and watch films about the relevant locations or eras. She also told Mavis Haut, author of The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee, that she sometimes just rushed in and wrote from her gut and instinct.

Lee would begin a project by telling herself she would start a story/novel tomorrow or whenever. She could start out with as little as a title, an image, a phrase, a feeling. Sometimes the characters came first, or the location, or even the time of day. On other occasions she might plan a bit in advance, but not even to the midpoint. She noted that her characters influenced the direction and ending of a plot. And her characters always surprised her. Which likely made it impossible to nail down a full outline in advance.

If she ran into blocks, and taking breaks didn’t work, she found she just had to hack her way through. Writing, when it went well, was like being possessed.

I suppose if I analyse it, it’s a case of letting go of the here and now, and getting into the then and there.

Tanith Lee in interview with Stan Nicholls

Lee was not someone who spent much time in rewriting. She would go through and tidy sentence structure and remove repetitions. But she didn’t rewrite for editors unless there was a genuine error. This might explain why her prose can be denser than other writers in the same genres.

She believed that when a book was ‘coming’, it came right. And the writing often poured out of her, though she could be hit by pauses when she struggled over something. Her French Revolution novel was an exception at the time of the interview with Stan Nicholls in that she wrote three drafts.

Lee also didn’t write for the market. She followed her own muse and instinctively knew that writing for the market would mean the end of her career and her love of writing. She had to write what she wanted to write.

It’s possible that in addition to having plenty of ideas to work with, the idea of writing commercially was like returning to the normal world of work she’d been glad to escape in her twenties. And, as a writer, she could live and work according to her own schedule. Her time was her own, not something to be fitted in around the demands of a full-time employer.

Lee’s approach to genre

In interviews, Lee often expressed a dislike of labels and genre. Her multi-genre interests would become a problem in the nineties as I deal with below. There are clearly far too many books to include here, so I’ve chosen to pick out only a few as examples.

Fantasy

For Tanith Lee, a good fantasy novel was similar to a good historical novel. And it was with fantasy that she began her professional career. I am less familiar with her early fantasy novels and can’t comment on them much other than to say they made her name. The Flat Earth Series in particular seems to be highly regarded.

Children’s fantasy was a big part of her work in this genre.

Some of her contemporary books, published later in her career, also had fantastic elements, like Eva Fairdeath, a post-apocalyptic novel. She also wrote dark fantasy – the Paradys series would be an example of that, though I deal with that later. Fairy tale and mythological stories overlap with fantasy, and that’s the next topic.

Fairy tales

Lee would go on to rework classic stories, most famously in her collection Red as Blood: Tales From the Sisters Grimmer. Just as her mother could turn fairy tale endings on their head, Lee too would make the supposed Evil Stepmother the heroine, and the Snow White character the real danger.

When The Clock Strikes is a retelling of Cinderella with a mysterious and sinister narrator:

Yes, the ballroom is filled only with dust now. The slender columns of white marble and the slender columns of rose-red marble are woven together by cobwebs. The vivid frescoes, on which the Duke’s treasury spent so much, are dimmed by the dust: the painted goddesses look grey. And the velvet curtains–touch them, they will crumble. Two hundred years now since anyone danced in this place on the sea-green floor in the candle-gleam. Two hundred years since the wonderful clock struck for the very last time…

When the Clock Strikes, Tanith Lee

Beauty and the Beast meanwhile opens on the Beast in space, looking down on Earth.

While Lee followed in the wake of Angela Carter’s feminist reworking of fairy tales, her multi-genre background, lush language, and strong visuals contrast with Carter’s style. Both writers bring their own unique style to their fairy tale retellings.

Science Fiction

When it came to science fiction, Lee wrote in the genre, but didn’t like some of what was published there and described herself as running in the opposite direction. She had read a lot more fantasy and science fiction in her teens, but in later years was drawn to other authors. Ray Bradbury was one of the authors she still bought. Her SF novels are often utopian-dystopian in nature. On the one hand, there are beautiful people living privileged lives, but there is always a dark underside.

In Don’t Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977), we’re introduced to what appears to be a utopian society. The opening lines show the narrator’s friend has killed himself again, for the fortieth time, needing a replacement body. This is a world where people kill themselves out of boredom, only to come back. The problems of utopianism and the lack of challenge to the young characters lead them to hedonism and lives that are less fulfilled than they could be. The characters can change bodies and genders, but their robot world leaves them with nothing else to do. To escape this world means exile and the dangers of what lies beyond.

Originally published separately, they now appear in a single volume (see above).

In The Silver Metal Lover (1981), Jane, a spoiled young woman, falls in love with a minstrel robot, Silver. Of course he’s different from the other robots. There is something unique about him, and it comes to represent the question of whether a robot can have a soul. Jane’s mother is a domineering figure, while her young friends are spoilt and shallow. A coming of age story, the MC has to break away and risk going out into the world without her mother’s money, all the time in danger of being found by the corporation who want Silver back.

These science-fiction novels fit into the Young Adult category. They’re lush and descriptive, with young characters trying to find their own way in their dystopian worlds. The Silver Metal Lover is particularly well-loved among fans.

I was out hunting the night my aunt Cassie died. As she was taking her last breath of revitalized Arean air, I was high on the Hammerhead Plateau, under forty thousand stars burning like diamond bonfires. Maybe I even killed in the same minute she let that last breath go.

Opening lines of Sabella

In the novella Sabella, Lee combined a story set on another planet (very similar to Mars) with the vampire genre. Humans have settled on Novo Mars, but the original inhabitants of the planet are a mystery, though archaeological artefacts have been found. Main character, Sabella, is a young woman, living by herself. It soon becomes clear that she is a vampire. But she doesn’t understand her own origins. After killing a lover, she suddenly finds a stranger at her door, a man who stalks her, wanting to know the truth…

Lee’s SF stories are poetic and lush. Within the then male-dominated field she was writing something quite different.

Horror, Gothic and vampire fiction

When it came to horror and dark fantasy, Lee had very much a goth sensibility. You can see it in photos of her as a young woman. Vampires creep up quite a bit in her writing. From her short story, Bite Me Not or Fleur de Fur, to her Blood Opera Sequence, to the 1995 novel Vivia, and many more stories.

Her Paradys series of books included The Book of the Damned (1988), The Book of the Beast (1988), The Book of the Dead (1989), and The Book of the Mad (1993). Set in an alternative Paris, the first book, Damned, is made up of three novellas, each set around different colours and stained glass windows. The time periods are the 19th century, the early fourteenth century, and the 1930s/40s. The first novella again deals with vampires.

The Booklist critic Roland Green said, “The whole work is an astonishingly good mix of horror, historical fantasy, and intense but well-handled eroticism… all of which no fantasist but Lee could probably achieve.“

The third book in this series, The Book of the Dead, is a series of connected stories. Lee would revisit alternative locations with her Secret Books of Venus, set in an alternate Venice.

Then there was her Blood Opera Sequence of gothic/vampire novels – Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994). Mavis Haut notes in her book, The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee, that this series had a contemporary setting owing to a request from the publisher.

Another vampire novel is The Blood of Roses, a huge book published in 1990 in the UK which didn’t stay in print for long. It was never published in the US. Luckily, Immanion Press have republished this book in two volumes.

Sudden publishing obstacles in the 1990s

But after her successes in the 1970s and 1980s, she hit major obstacles in the 1990s. Due to changes in the publishing industry (including consolidation), she suddenly found her proposals and books rejected. Publishers and editors who’d worked with her previously were no longer interested. There came a point where fans wrote to ask if she’d died because no new books had been published.

Because she wrote in more than one genre, she could receive rejections from publishers saying they’d never heard of her (because they were unfamiliar with her other genres) or she wasn’t writing what she usually did, so they weren’t interested. However, the problems escalated in the nineties.

In spite of this, Lee just kept on writing, building up a body of unpublished work, stacked in a cupboard. The problem in publishing related to a number of changes that took place in that decade. But the increasing obsession with publishing categories and authors writing the same kind of thing (seen as more reliable and less risky) hit multi-genre authors like Lee.

”If anyone ever wonders why there’s nothing coming from me, it’s not my fault. I’m doing the work. No, I haven’t deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can’t get anything into print. And apparently I’m not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, ‘I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can’t publish it – I’ve been told I mustn’t.’ The indication is that I’m not writing what people want to read, but I never did.”

Tanith Lee in Locus Magazine

Ultimately, smaller publishers and the internet would come to the rescue. Immanion Press have also re-released some of her books and published newer works.

But the changes that came in the nineties impacted a lot of authors. It wasn’t just a multi-genre writer like Tanith Lee. Midlist authors in general took a hit. As time went on, publishing decisions were founded on the sales figures for the last book. If the last book didn’t do so well, you’d likely face rejection.

Judas Garbah and Esther Garber

Later, Lee would write some fiction ‘channelled’ from Esther Garber and her half-brother Judas Garbah. These writing personae allowed her to explore same-sex attraction. The short story collection Disturbed by Her Song brings these stories together. While I believe I have this book on my Kindle, I haven’t had a chance to read it. This collection was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Speculative Fiction since the channelled sibling writers are gay.

Lessons to learn from Tanith Lee

As a developmental editor and fan of her work, I was particularly interested in her approach to writing, which is why I’ve focused more on that than on the individual works themselves. I found her ‘channelling’ of her stories, as if picking up something from the atmosphere to make perfect sense for her style of writing. In one interview, she even speculated on it being related to ‘race memories’:

…we’re all built of all these genes in little bits and pieces that come through to us from the very beginning of our ancestry and it seems to me quite logical that some of those genes can carry recollections. Some people are more susceptible to it than others, which means one’s seen a hell of a lot of things, the genes have, and if they can pass it on to the brain, one could pick it up, and amalgamate a bit here and a bit there, and you’d have a story and a set of characters.

Not all writers approach writing like Tanith Lee. Some writers are conscious plotters. In another blog post, I addressed Ira Levin’s very different style of writing where he only wrote one draft, but went over and over a scene before moving on to the next. With Lee, the writing is pouring out from somewhere.

She deals with myth, fairy tale, archetypes, gender and sexuality, and much more. She saw her overall body of work like a mosaic, with the overall picture not yet clear.

My aim with this post was to introduce new readers and also writers to Lee. But I’m often concerned with some of the writing advice given to writers, especially newer writers. It often demands a very conscious approach to the writing process, juggling different components of writing in a way that might overwhelm some writers.

Sometimes it looks like the component parts of a fictional machine lying dismantled on the floor. Yet writing is organic.

Part of the reason for some of this advice is about marketing expertise and trying to find some writing topic to show that expertise. This can lead to informative posts. But some of the advice looks too much like micro-managing to me. It might work for some writers, but it will possibly lead to writing blocks for others.

Lee’s early exposure to fairy tale, Shakespeare, and more, and her advanced reading skills (once she overcame the mild dyslexia problem) likely gave her an instinctive grasp of storytelling, character, and theme.

Reading lots of books is the best advice for writers. Absorb different styles and see what works best for you. You might indeed be someone who likes to plot out your novel with spreadsheets. But you might be someone who feels they’re possessed, channelling characters and wondering what the hell is going on.

Well, you wouldn’t be the first writer to experience that. For Lee, it seemed to be part of what made her work resonate with so many people.

When you mention Tanith Lee’s name online, you’ll often find strangers turn up to say how much they loved her books. But in Lee’s case, there are so many books, and even more short stories.

Darrell Schweitzer once said that:

…this lady is one of the literary dynamos of our time, enormously prolific in the novel, the short story and all lengths in between; but, quite unlike most hyper-prolific writers of the past, she has maintained an astonishingly high level of quality throughout her career

References

The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee by Mavis Haut (McFarland, 2001) digs into many (though not all) of Lee’s novels. There is also a brief interview with Lee at the end.

Has an Art Deco Radio Box in Her Head – Chapter 37 of Wordsmiths of Wonder by Stan Nicholls (Orbit, 1993). This book is a collection of interviews with different authors. The tag line on the cover says ‘Fifty interviews with authors of the fantastic’. Lee’s interview digs into her childhood, her early career, her issues with categorisation, how long she takes to write, and more. It was a good source of information for this article.

Speaking of Horror: Interviews with the Writers of the Supernatural: v. 48 by Darrell Schweitzer

Some of Lee’s books, especially short story collections, have either forewords or little snippets of her commentary introducing them, which has added to my understanding of her approach to writing.

Locus Magazine 1998 interview

Tabula Rasa Interview

Tanith Lee Obituary in the Guardian

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