Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee (19 September 1947 – 24 May 2015) was a British science fiction and fantasy writer. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. She also wrote a children's picture book (Animal Castle), and many poems. She wrote two episodes of the BBC science fiction series Blake's 7 ("Sand" and "Sarcophagus").

She was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel (also known as the August Derleth Award), for her book Death's Master (1980).

Biography

Early life

Tanith Lee was born on 19 September 1947 in London, to professional dancers Bernard and Hylda Lee. Despite a persistent rumour, she was not the daughter of Bernard Lee (the actor who played "M" in the James Bond series films between 1962 and 1979). According to Lee, although her childhood was happy, she was the "traditional kid that got bullied," and had to move around frequently due to her parents' work. Although her family was poor, they maintained a large paperback collection, and Lee read weird fiction, including "Silken Swift" by Theodore Sturgeon and "Gabriel Ernest" by Saki, and discussed such literature as Hamlet and Dracula with her parents. Lee attended many different schools in childhood. She was at first "incapable" of reading due to a mild form of dyslexia, which was diagnosed later in life, but when she was aged 8, her father taught her to read in a few months, and she began to write at the age of 9.

Education

Because Lee's parents had to move for jobs, Lee attended numerous primary schools, then the Prendergast Grammar School for Girls. After secondary school, Lee attended Croydon Art College for a year. Realising that was not what she wanted to do, she dropped out of her course and held a number of jobs, including file clerk, waitress, shop assistant, and assistant librarian.

Writing career

She began publishing with The Betrothed (1968), a short story privately printed by a friend, but started serious writing with several children's fantasies. Of these, The Dragon Hoard (1971), her first novel, is a comic fantasy, in which an enchantress compels the quest-ridden protagonist to shapeshift into a raven at unpredictable moments. Princess Hynchatti & Some Other Surprises (collection of linked stories in 1972) puts its cast through various travails. In Companions on the Road (1975) the companions are the villains, a trio of hellish revenants who kill through their control of Dreams as they search for the holders of a magic chalice. The Winter Players (1976) – assembled with the previous book as Companions on the Road and The Winter Players: Two Novellas (1977) – dramatises the interaction between a young woman and the accursed wanderer whom she ultimately redeems. Even in these early works, several characteristic motifs dominate: the Rite of Passage whereby a young protagonist comes to terms – often via Metamorphosis – with his or her extraordinary nature, and strives for Balance in a riven world; vivid, but indeterminate, landscapes serving as almost interchangeable backdrops for psychic dramas; and a fine indifference to any moralistic settling of scores, her tales tending to close with Good and Evil characters settling into uneasy equipoise.

Her first professional sale came from "Eustace," a ninety-word vignette at the age of 21 in 1968. She continued to work in various jobs for almost another decade, due to rejection of her books. Her first novel (for children) was The Dragon Hoard, published in 1971 by Macmillan. Her career took off with the acceptance in 1975 by DAW Books USA of her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave – a mass-market paperback. Many British publishers rejected The Birthgrave so she approached DAW Books. Lee subsequently maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing. The Birthgrave allowed Lee to be a full-time writer and stop doing "stupid and soul-killing jobs."

During the nineties her "career went through the doldrums" because of trends in publishing. Major publishing companies were less accepting of Lee's later works. The companies which Lee worked with for years refused to look at her proposals. Smaller companies were publishing just a few of Lee's works. The refusals did not stop her from writing and she had numerous unpublished novels and short stories. Letters from fans asked if she were dead because no new work had been published. Lee tried changing her genre, but to no success. However, Internet sales succeeded in reviving her writing.

Book sales

Lee had "quietly phenomenal sales" at certain periods throughout her career. When she tried changing genres, some of her works were liked by critics and published by small publishers, but it made no difference. The royalties were good before the publishers went bankrupt.

Personal life and death

In 1987, Lee met artist and writer John Kaiine. In 1992, the couple married. They lived in the south of England.

Lee died at her home in East Sussex of breast cancer on 24 May 2015.

Works

Lee often used the transitional character of the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age stories. For instance, the protagonist of Lee's The Birthgrave undertakes a journey to understanding her identity and culture.

Lee's two longest werewolf stories, "Wolfland" and Lycanthia, followed Lee's custom of reversing the images of popular culture icons. Lee approximated the werewolves' behaviours according to the social and hunting patterns of wild wolves. In altering this trope, she endowed werewolf stories with a new and more positive mythos.

Lee's 1971 debut was the children's book The Dragon Hoard; her first adult book was The Birthgrave in 1975. Lee's prolific output spans a host of different genres, including adult fantasy, children's fantasy, science fiction, horror, Gothic horror, Gothic romance, and historical fiction. Her series of interconnected tales called The Flat-Earth Cycle, beginning with Night's Master and Death's Master, is similar in scope and breadth to Jack Vance's The Dying Earth.