"My fiction is the natural outgrowth of my fascination with the times:" an Interview with Candace Robb

Candace Robb is author of the Owen Archer detective novels, set in late-fourteenth-century York, and the Margaret Kerr detective fiction series, set in Scotland at the time of Edward I's invasion. Writing as Emma Campion, she is the author of the novels The King's Mistress and A Triple Knot, both set during the reign of Edward III. Candace spoke to Michael Evans, an assistant editor of Medievally Speaking, about novels, history, and 'the ethics of historical fiction.' 

ME: Tell us a little about your background in medieval studies, and how you came to write historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. 

CR: I did my graduate work in English literature with a strong concentration in medieval and Anglo-Saxon literature and history. I received my MA and completed the coursework for a PhD in English lit and then… There’s a saw about climbing up to the top rung of a ladder only to discover it’s propped against the wrong tree; but, for me, I’d say I’d climbed the ladder and suddenly saw the forest and wanted to take off and fly from tree to tree, to experience it all, not limit myself to the one I’d climbed. My engagement in the literature had inspired a burning curiosity about how it was to live in those times; the people seemed so like me and, at the same time, so different. But my university was not set up for an interdisciplinary doctorate in medieval studies. So I left. I became an editor of research publications in a university laboratory where I had easy access to a fine research library. I continued my studies in all things medieval and haven’t stopped. Had I been able to assemble an interdisciplinary committee for my dissertation, there might never have been an Owen Archer, Lucie Wilton, Magda Digby, Margaret Kerr, Emma Campion…. My fiction is the natural outgrowth of my fascination with the times. And it didn’t hurt that Ursula LeGuin encouraged me in that direction in a writing workshop years ago. 

ME: How do you see the intersection between ‘academic’ history, and the role of the historical fiction author? Can academic history inform the historical fiction writer, and vice versa?

CR: Academic history is essential to me, which is why I make the pilgrimage to the Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan U almost every May, and often attend the Leeds congress as well. I also stay in touch with a number of academics working in history and literature, and I read read read. I base my fiction on educated guesses based on others’ research; my motivation remains the same—to explore with my imagination how it was to live in the late middle ages. What I add to the mix is the emotion, the heart. I start with facts about the times, and then spin out a speculative yarn, one that entertains. My sleuth Owen Archer was inspired by an article about the longbow. Thinking about the strength and skill it required. How King Edward valued the Welsh longbowmen. How one of them might rise in the ranks. How important, to a right-handed archer his left eye would be… All this came from reading someone’s research on the longbow. 

As to whether historical fiction can inform academic history, I’d say a novelist might perform the same function as students who ask question after question in class or write imaginative papers. Fresh questions are a wellspring, after all, triggering new ideas, speculation. It’s fun to imagine a historian looked up from one of my books with an 'aha'! Maybe something I said about King Edward’s determination that William Wykeham should be the Bishop of Winchester suggested a closer look (The King’s Bishop); or my toying with John Gisburn’s reputation as a merchant and mayor of York in several of the Owen Archers; or Joan of Kent’s burning question for Archbishop Thoresby in A Vigil of Spies. 

ME: It seems to me that historical fiction authors take their research very seriously – for example, your author’s note at the end of A Triple Knot contains footnotes referring to scholarly sources. How much of a duty does the author have to ‘get it right’? How much authorial license does he or she have to alter events, or at least to fill in the gaps in the historical record? 

CR: A caveat: I answer this in light of my own work, my own goal in writing historical fiction. I see altering events and filling in the gaps as two quite different activities.  

When writing about Joan of Kent or Alice Perrers I could not write a coherent narrative without filling in the gaps—the historical record for Joan and Alice is too sparse. So I see filling in the gaps as connecting the dots with plausible motives, incidents, catalysts, emotions that lead from one known point to the next. The gaps can involve largely unimportant but intriguing facts, such as how and why Alice Perrers acquired such a quantity of pearls (The King’s Mistress), or more significant issues, such as the decisions I made about just what sort of “garter” is immortalized in the Order of the Garter, and the origin of the Countess of Salisbury garter incident (A Triple Knot). 

Altering events that are in the historical record doesn’t interest me. In writing the biographical novels, The King’s Mistress and A Triple Knot; and in the Margaret Kerr series, I stuck to the facts as closely as possible, though filtered through a point-of-view character whose interpretation is necessarily personal. In the Owen Archer mysteries I steer clear of the famous, well-documented incidents so that I can enjoy more freedom in plotting. Well, except for allowing John Thoresby to extend his time as Lord Chancellor for some years. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to play with that. 

A while ago I was invited to give a talk about writing historical fiction at Cornell University, after which members of the philosophy department joined me in a round table. Our topic was the ethics of historical fiction, and we agreed that my unspoken but implied contract with my readers is that I do my best to present a plausible, carefully researched historical background.

The Author’s Note is the spot in which most historical novelists state where we’ve taken authorial license. Just to keep the record straight. 

ME: In our post-modern age, the pursuit of ‘historical truth’ might be seen as impossible, yet I see readers of historical fiction – and history-lovers in general – on social media or online forums getting very upset if an author or film-maker takes liberties with history. Does ‘historical accuracy’ matter? 

CR: Does historical accuracy matter? It depends on what the artist is after. In my case, it’s pretty much the point, isn’t it?  I write out of my enthusiasm for what has been discovered about the late medieval period. 

I’m not entirely clear about what you’re saying about the post-modern age and “historical truth.” Are you referring to how quickly new evidence is uncovered and disseminated? How can I possibly keep up? If so, yes, that’s an issue. I know it’s very likely that what I thought of as quite accurate might very well be disproved down the road. That’s why I keep returning to my motive as an artist—I’m feeding my curiosity and having fun fashioning it into entertainment. I was already quite far into the first draft of The King’s Mistress when Mark Ormrod turned up evidence that “Perrers” was not Alice’s maiden name, but the name of her first husband. I made the choice at the time, finding the new information irresistible, to start over. But my editor had the edited manuscript in hand when Mark told me that he’d changed his mind about some dates; at that point I chose to stay with what I had. Or maybe it was my editor—I do recall her reminding me that I’d written a novel, not a dissertation. 

ME: I was thinking of the argument that it’s impossible to arrive at ‘historical truth’; instead, we only have a number of competing discourses about the past, all of which carry the biases of the people who created them. How does this affect the historical fiction author? 

CR: The more I ponder this question, the more I doubt there is any such thing as “historical truth”. The truth of the human condition is something art can suggest, but I don’t think anyone, including an archivist strictly reporting the facts, can ever deliver the Truth of a specific historic event. No one can, not even one who was present—each participant had a unique experience. 

So, how do I answer this? Of course I tend to trust historians who share my bias; yet I question even their theories. There is nothing like putting it into motion in a plot for exposing the holes in a theory. But I don’t see this as a change, something unique about the post-modern age. “Truth” is slippery. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never tried my hand at non-fiction! Even now, in this conversation, we’re role-playing, aren’t we?  I’ve gone off point again, I know—perhaps we’re simply more aware of the futility in the post-modern age. 

ME: You are best known for your Owen Archer series. Do you see a connection between the role of a detective such as Owen, and that of the author or historian in their search for elusive historical evidence?

CR: Oh yes, absolutely! I’ve honed my skill as an interrogator by spending so much time in the mind of a sleuth. I question everything, even the conclusions of scholars I respect (see above)! And that’s the delight of writing for me—I’m always reaching for that elusive idea just at the edge of the story. I write in layers of 'ahas'! I discover the story and the secrets of my characters as I go. Something seemingly insignificant that I add to the story today will wake me up tonight with a startling connection to something else. The seed event for the Countess of Salisbury story regarding the garter that I wove into A Triple Knot took shape in my mind as I wrote—I hadn’t planned it. I read the scholarly opinions and wound up with my own, but based on everything I’d read. The best sleuths are independent thinkers, aren’t they? Inspector Morse, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes—they’re always irritating people with seemingly irrelevant questions.  

ME: Can an author – or an academic historian, for that matter – ever truly get inside the head of a figure from the medieval past? Or are our ways of thought too different from theirs?

CR: Can anyone ever truly get inside another’s head? Even our contemporaries? I enjoy trying to see the world through the eyes of someone who knows nothing of technology, who perhaps can’t read or write, who may never have traveled more than a few miles from their homes. But am I accurate? Perhaps a little, perhaps more than that. I enjoy the attempt. Perhaps the reason I found this work so engaging and accessible is that I’d been steeped in the literature of the period—songs, poems, epics, sermons. At the end of the day, as the author of trade fiction my primary job is to entertain my contemporaries, so my characters need to make sense to them. 

  

ME: Historical fiction is written off as genre fiction by some critics. Do you see this changing, especially following the critical success of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels?

CR: All good writing deserves respect. 

ME: I agree – I think there can be a false dichotomy between ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ fiction. After all, Dickens, Flaubert, Dumas etc. wrote ‘historical’ novels. 

Which novelists have influenced your work?

CR: I don’t consciously follow anyone’s style, though I sometimes hear cadences of Anne Sexton’s poetry or Tom Stoppard’s dialogue and wonder whether I’ve read Transformations or seen (and read) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead too often. I believe that it was Marchette Chute’s children’s book The Innocent Wayfaring that brought to the foreground the medieval setting of so many fairy tales and stirred my curiosity about Chaucer. But if you mean whose writing I love, whose books inspired my own attempts at writing, oh, so many! I have eclectic taste. Early influences—E. Nesbit, Margaret Sutton (the Judy Bolton detective series), Madeleine L’Engle (I wrote to invite her to my Brownie Scouts meeting when I was presenting a book report on A Wrinkle in Time—she cordially declined). Soon I shifted to Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Mary Stewart, Mary Renault, Anya Seton. Later, Ursula LeGuin, P. D. James, C. J. Cherryh (for making the strange feel familiar), Martha Grimes (the humor and the community of  characters), Colin Dexter (for Morse’s irritating questions), John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (for playing with stereotypes about the past), Raymond Chandler, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, Thomas Hardy, J. R. R. Tolkien. I’ll stop there. I think I’ve gone far past the point of your question. 

ME: Surveys such as Mary Tod’s suggest that the majority of historical fiction authors and readers are women. Why do you think this might be? 

CR: Hm… respondents were 83% female, 17% male, but does that have more to do with who’s more likely to answer such a survey, and be reached online, or who reads historical fiction? And it can’t help but vary according to the author, or even among an author’s books. I have a large Italian readership that isn’t even specifically represented here. I warn you, I performed horribly on multiple choice and true/false questions in school—my mind immediately begins spinning through possible exceptions. 

That said, if the statistics are true, perhaps this has as much to do with who editors perceive as the audience, and hence what they buy, as it does with what the market might support. And consider the covers, the headless woman in period dress (not necessarily the period of the novel) or the woman with her back to the observer. I’ve sensed editors increasingly playing to the female reader. Despite the popularity of the Owen Archer series, whenever I’ve suggested a new series my agents have recommended I choose a female sleuth. My fan “mail,” whether electronic or paper (increasingly rare), has a slightly higher male to female ratio for the Owen Archers, and reversed for the Margaret Kerrs, The King’s Mistress and A Triple Knot. 

But I’ve noticed a number of self-published authors writing male-dominated books with heavily martial themes and little evidence, at least in the marketing copy or the covers, of romance. I wonder whether they simply could not get the attention of traditional publishers?

See? I always search for the exceptions to the apparent rule. It’s a fascinating survey, but my mind can’t rest there. 

ME: I’ve noticed the ‘headless woman’ trend recently. Do you have any thoughts about why this trend has come about? I worry that female identity is being erased by these covers that don’t show the woman as an individual – I am over-thinking this, or is this a real concern? 

CR: It’s ghastly, isn’t it? I asked my editor at Crown about it a few years ago. Her explanation was that readers don’t like to have the appearance of the heroine thrust upon them, so the publishers have chosen to either not show the heroine’s head at all, or just from the back (as with my two most recent trade paperbacks in the US). 

Yours is an interesting take. 

ME: Was there any feminist (however we wish to interpret that word) intent behind your desire to write about Alice Perrers and Joan of Kent, given that both of them (Alice especially) have arguably been misrepresented by history?

CR: Yes, of course there was some feminist intent, but that motivation would not have gotten me far if I’d not found Alice and Joan strong, complicated women with stories that defied categorization. I once made the mistake of making light of Alice Perrers, in several of the Owen Archer novels; but even in those books I found her too slippery to stay in the cliché. She kept spinning away, changing the story. Joan of Kent has intrigued me ever since I read Karl P. Wentersdorf’s article “The Clandestine Marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent” (Medieval History 5, 1979, 203-131). And then, after exploring her in middle age in A Vigil of Spies (Owen Archer #10), and working with her as a fairly important character in The King’s Mistress, I could not resist the challenge of unraveling the story of her marriages. 

ME: Why do you think there is such an ongoing fascination among the reading public with the Middle Ages? 

CR: Pre-industrial, pre-technology, close enough in time and culture to be familiar and yet far enough in the past to be exotic? Dungeons and Dragons? Tolkien? George R. R. Martin? Armor? Knights? Owen Archer? Hah! (Shrug.) Fairy tales often feel as if they take place in a medieval setting, and, of course, Arthurian tales were read to us at bedtime. Perhaps it simply feels familiar. 

ME: Will we be seeing you at Kalamazoo [International Congress on Medieval Studies] this May?

CR: Yes, you will. Catch me in the roundtable sponsored by the Tales After Tolkien Society, 'From Frodo to Fidelma: Medievalisms in Popular Genres,' 1:30 Saturday. My topic is “Crimes and Conspiracies in Town and Court: Embodying Late Medieval Life”. See you there!

Michael Evans
Central Michigan University

D’Arcens and Lynch (eds): International Medievalism and Popular Culture

Louise D’ Arcens and Andrew Lynch (eds). International Medievalism and Popular Culture. New York: Cambria, 2014. 261pp.

Review by: Molly Brown (molly.brown@up.ac.za)

In one of the essays in this volume, Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg comment that “nothing is easier to mock than medieval aspirations under the harsh light of colonial sunshine” (94). The opposition established in this wry comment on the appearance of the United Tinsmiths marching through the early twentieth-century streets of Melbourne dressed in full or partial suits of armour is reflected throughout this collection in which contemporary scholars associated with the global South focus their attention on a range of tropes and issues conventionally linked to a Northern past. The resulting polarization throws new light on both post-colonial and medieval concerns, allowing two once othered discourses to interact in unexpected and illuminating ways.

The editors acknowledge that achieving this exhilarating creative synergy was precisely their intention. In their introduction they refer to the significance of what Caroline Dinshaw has recently termed atemporal encounters in which “different time frames or temporal systems collid[e]” and argue that the recursive presence of the medieval within the modern not only blurs temporal distinctions, but actually “creates a cultural topography in which national boundaries are redrawn or erased, and familiar polarities and spatial coordinates no longer apply” (xii). In this way the volume becomes a celebration of the multitemporal potentialities inherent in a variety of perspectives on how medievalism may be seen to permeate and in some cases, articulate socio-political aspects of modernity and even postmodernity. 

The current proliferation of volumes of thematically-linked academic essays has been fuelled at least in part, by a postmodern predilection for heteroglossia, but all too often, a form that should facilitate unexpected insights and stimulating differences collapses instead into works in which the individual components talk past instead of to each other. Thanks to the editors’ clear sense and lucid articulation of the importance of the new topography they aim to explore, the essays in  International Medievalism and Popular Culture are given the freedom to range widely without any threat to the essential coherence of the collection as a whole.

International Medievalism and Popular Culture contains twelve essays on subjects ranging from medievalism and contemporary Middle Eastern politics to the presentation of dragons and teenage wizards in fantasies for younger readers. Such is the current rage for specialization that many readers are likely to turn only to those essays directly related to their own interests, but  those who do this will not fully appreciate the strength of the collection as a whole, since all of these essays are linked by a nuanced understanding of how concepts of the medieval commonly infuse and enter into dialogue with responses to the contemporary.

Appropriately enough, the opening essay by Clare Monagle addresses crucial issues of sovereignty and neomedievalism by revisiting the seminal work of an earlier Australian political theorist, Hedley Bull. Bull argued as early as 1977 that the once-dominant concept of the national state was in decline before later suggesting in The Anarchical Society (1995) that this decline would lead to what he called the New Medievalism, a secular version of the system of overlapping or segmented authority presented by him as characteristic of medieval Christendom. Monagle deftly acknowledges the significance of Bull’s work, while also revealing that it may be read as rooted in anxiety about all non-modern forms of political life, so that the “actions of socialist and third world states, the actions of terrorists, and the political formations of primitive societies prior to invasion and colonisation, as well as the political cultures of the Western Middle Ages themselves…are all yoked under the analogy of the medieval, flattened into a disturbing past and a futurological otherness” (12).In this way, Monagle is able to show that the concept of New Medievalism as applied by neoconservatives leads to a refusal to consider the “specificity of the other’s historicity” (13) allowing al Qaeda, for instance, to be presented as the medievalised enemy.

This tendency to use the medieval as a lens through which to examine and even counteract current East West conflicts is illuminatingly developed in Louise D’Arcens analysis of three films by Riddley Scott. D’Arcens, who is widely known for her work on medievalism in Australian and international contexts, argues persuasively that Scott uses his films to explore subjects too sensitive to address more directly, so that in a startling reversal, Robin Hood’s tactics of resistance against his Norman oppressors (Robin Hood, 2010) can be seen to echo the ground-level activities of al Qaeda and the central figure in Body of Lies (2008) “rather than seeking a better Aussie-style multicultural life for all, goes to ground, quite possibly to become a high-skill terrorist” (249). Intriguingly, American medievalist, John Ganim shows that it is not merely the western gaze that projects medieval memes onto contemporary conflicts but that great Islamic medieval figures such as Saladin, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta have become powerful symbols for those anxious to modernise the Islamic world from within. Each of these medieval figures has been used in various contexts and in various Arab states to evoke tradition, but the tradition concerned is one of “Golden Age cosmopolitanism, of geographic mobility before the borders of nation-states, and of often improvisational inventiveness” (71).

If medievalism can allow for multiple interpretations of the othered Orient, a second group of essays from International Medievalism and Popular Culture focuses on how the medieval may help, in Chantal Bourgault du Coudray’s words “to reinstate values that are essential to the reinvention of a subjective experience that challenges the gendered dynamics of Cartesian thought” (153). Du Coudray’s positive re-visioning of the story of Red Riding Hood refreshingly undermines standard readings of the story as one that restricts the feminine and promotes patriarchal authority. Laurie Ormond’s study of witch hunters in contemporary fantasy fiction makes an interesting companion piece to Du Coudray’s essay in that it draws on a similar body of theory, but uses it to infer that while fantasy fiction rarely elides sexual violence against women and therefore resists conventions that systematically downplay the trauma this causes, such works cannot be seen as legitimate forms of feminist protest because they also conform too readily to enduring cultural stereotypes grounded in “an essentialist understanding of female vulnerability that accompanies the figure of the monstrous and deviant rapist” (177). Nicholas Haydock, on the other hand, discusses Julia Kristeva’s   Murder in Byzantium in which a modern scholar is drawn into an enhanced understanding of the First Crusade by an interest in the writing of the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene. Stephen Knight observes in his engaging conclusion to the collection that the reverse pilgrimage described by Haydock  both “claims the Medieval for the Middle-East” and simultaneously uses “forms of abjection seen across time as reason at war with meaning, but also as access to the other”(249).

This idea of accessing otherness is crucial to any assessment of International Medievalism and Popular Culture since it demonstrates not only that the oriental and the woman can both be simultaneously othered and affirmed by competing medievalisms, but so also may the child, who  as modern theorists have noted, has much in common with both. Clare Bradford’s essay, “Here Be Dragons”, argues that dragon stories promote a ludic engagement with texts in that they offer images of delightful alterity, while in no way deluding young readers about the precise boundaries of the fictional and the real. Instead she suggests that by drawing attention to “the codes, conventions and cultural meanings that inform dragon narratives….[such stories] teach interpretive strategies, conducting a kind of training in reading the medieval” (221). In ‘The Battle for Reality’, on the other hand, Helen Dell makes a thought-provoking contribution to the interpretation of the animosity felt towards Harry Potter by the religious right. Rather than glibly dismissing this as an instance of either hysterical fanaticism or neoconservative distrust of the imagination, Dell carefully teases out the implications of a logocentric world view in which words are both frighteningly potent and dangerously vulnerable to change. This leads her to conclude suggestively that “J.K. Rowling with her free-wheeling, ‘unbaptized’ imagination and her blithe disregard for the potency of words together with her immense popularity, presents conservatives with the gravest of threats – the threat to reality” (33).

While a Southern sensibility infuses almost all the essays in this volume, it is particularly apparent in what might be seen as the three most overtly Australian essays in the book. The first of these is Karen Hall’s exploration of medieval influences and connections in the work of four contemporary Australian artists: Alexia Sinclair, G.W. Bot, Irene Barberis, and Laith Mc Gregor. The second is Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg’s nuanced study of the ways in which organised labour in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Melbourne consciously positioned itself in relation to medieval chivalry in ways that are both reminiscent of and different from the strategies used by  the international Knights of Labour. The third is Anne McKendry’s analysis of how Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger and Russell Crowe flavour the medieval-themed films, Braveheart (1995), A Knight’s Tale (2001) and Robin Hood (2010), with an Australian sense of mateship expressed in terms of a distinctively egalitarian sense of male bonding, which she argues also “functions as an unidentified – yet discernible factor in the appeal these characters have for broader international audiences” (198). Each of these articles is remarkable for foregrounding the fact that concepts of medievalism do not simply feed into contemporary life, but  in complex reflexive processes, are themselves altered and shaped by current conventions and modes of expression.

If one were of a mind to quibble, one might wish for more chapters like those described in the previous paragraph, analyses that are both unequivocally local and yet suggestive of broader global patterns. It would certainly have been intriguing to have had articles by scholars firmly located in other areas of the global South to sharpen awareness of what Australian and global medievalism have in common and also give a clearer indication of what differentiates them. I confess too that I found the grouping of illustrations at the end of chapters annoying as it required one to riffle continuously backward and forward, especially in chapters like that by Karen Hall where an appreciation of images was central to an understanding of her argument. In addition, I suspect that the casual reader might also have appreciated the listing of full titles in the table of contents so that it would not be necessary to turn to the first page of each essay in order to get a clear indication of its subject matter. Despite these minor qualms, however, International Medievalism and Popular Culture is an intelligently edited, original and suggestive collection that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in the fields of either postcolonial studies or contemporary medievalism. 

Molly Brown

University of Pretoria

South Africa

Pérez: The Myth of Morgan la Fey

Pérez, Kristina, The Myth of Morgan la Fey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 262.

Reviewed by Kristi J. Castleberry (kristi.castleberry@gmail.com)

Morgan la Fey is a slippery, shadowy figure. She hurts Arthur and she heals Arthur; she is the enemy of the Round Table and she is the only hope that it may return. She is beautiful and powerful and terrifying. Kristina Pérez's The Myth of Morgan la Fey takes on the ambitious project of grappling with Morgan in myth and text and film and popular culture, easily moving between ancient and medieval and modern sources in the process. Pérez states in her preface that, "[b]y exploring the shifting portrayal of Morgan from Celtic Sovereignty Goddess to cartoon super-villain, we will find that real meanings and definitions are located in the place between two extremes," and she does keep well to this purpose throughout the book (xii). The historical breadth of the project renders it particularly appropriate to the topic of medievalism, since it gives such a thorough account of both the medieval stories and how those sources have been reimagined by later periods.

The preface features a strong authorial voice. Pérez discusses her first encounter with Morgan la Fey when she was an insecure thirteen-year-old who discovered Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. She mentions that, as a medievalist, "the admission that you might have first developed a love for your subject from a fantasy novel ... is a guilty secret that many of us share" (xi). By sharing that secret with us, Pérez creates a personalized tone that is rare in scholarly monographs. This breakdown between the professional and personal seems particularly appropriate for a work that concerns the limiting binaries forced upon Morgan and other female figures. She explains that her goal is "to make an original contribution to the academic scholarship surrounding this transformative character and to bring Morgan la Fey to a wider audience of Arthurian students and enthusiasts alike" (xiii). She thus frames the book for an audience both within and outside of academia. Because the sense of Pérez herself is so strong in the preface, I was surprised that the "I" didn't continue in the rest of the book. The tone becomes, from the introduction until the end, much more formal and distanced, shifting to the third person and plural first person. The preface creates such a strong sense of who the author is that I missed that personal voice as I continued reading.

The book's introduction begins with the end of the story—Camelot has fallen and "Morgan la Fay is the last one standing" (1). Whether or not she is described as an enemy to Arthur and the Round Table, Morgan is still a figure of healing and hope in the end. Pérez traces this complicated characterization back to the figure of the Celtic Sovereignty Goddess whose "dual function as kingmaker and death-dealer" the rest of the book explores (2). The introduction does a nice job of laying out a complex history of both Morgan specifically and the sovereignty goddess more generally, and the deft way with which Pérez moves between a wide range of material is impressive. The introduction also sets up the psychoanalytical framework that will be the primary lens of the book. She explains that "[i]n the same way as pioneering psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung turned to myth to inform their understanding of interpersonal relationships, we will use psychoanalysis to understand myth itself" (9). This statement seems a bit cyclical, and I found myself wanting more explanation about why this methodology is useful. What can psychoanalysis offer myth in particular? The first two chapters attempt to answer this question.

The first chapter convincingly argues that the split between Morgan la Fey and the Dame du Lac comes from the inability to reconcile the different aspects of the Morgan figure (mother and lover, healer and destroyer). The chapter introduces psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's concept of the "Oresteian Position," which becomes a central idea for the remainder of the text. As Pérez explains, "[a]ttempts by our heroes to contain their Oresteian Mothers result in either perversion (a defense against her), or psychosis (the full negative impact of the Oresteian Position)" (16). In some ways the book becomes more about the masculine anxieties about women than about Morgan herself, but perhaps that is what makes the subject so relevant.

The second chapter introduces Slavoj Žižek's concept of "courtly masochism," which "attempts to compensate for the reduction of Woman to phantasy" (35). Pérez argues that Sovereignty Goddesses and Fairy Mistresses from Celtic and Breton sources complicate this notion because in these cases "the Woman literally is a phantasy figure" (36). This chapter, like the first, is more focused on setting up the book’s psychoanalytic framework than on Morgan herself, but it does define the terms with which the book will discuss Morgan.

With chapter three the book begins to delve more directly into medieval materials. This chapter discusses Morgan as a monstrous mother and connects her to the Mélusine tradition, since Mélusine "remains the image of monstrous motherhood par excellence, and because she and Morgan share common Celtic origins" (55). Pérez shows us how Mélusine transforms back and forth between two different forms, while Morgan "is cut into two separate personages" (59). The examples of these figures in the chapter show how tensions between the roles of mother and lover result in literal splitting. Instead of recognizing more complex possibilities for identity that allow for women to be both mothers and lovers, the traditions of both Morgan and Mélusine attempt to reassert the desired split categories.

After the chapter on monstrous mothers, it makes sense that the fourth chapter concerns divine mothers, and it explores the Dame du Lac and the Virgin Mary in relation to Morgan. Since the Dame du Lac is a mother to Lancelot without having given birth to him, she is allowed to be a mother without having been compromised by sexuality and childbirth: "she is whole, like the Virgin Mary" (75). The Dame du Lac is thus the good mother to Morgan’s bad one. Since Morgan also heals Arthur and the Dame du Lac also traps Merlin, I am unsure about the simple dichotomy of Morgan and Dame du Lac as bad and good mother respectively, but Pérez does acknowledge that depictions of the Dame du Lac trapping Merlin ultimately complicate her role. I would have liked to hear even more about the implications of the Dame du Lac being a bad mother as well as a good one, but Pérez nonetheless shows that the primary focus on each of these figures tends to reinforce that splitting between bad and good mother.

The fifth chapter shifts focus to examine Gawain and the perennial question of what women want. The chapter begins with Mary's role as intercessor, which connects back to the chapter on divine mothers and leads nicely into a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The pull between the power of Mary and Morgan in the poem fits nicely with the category of Oresteian Mother, and the chapter provides a new understanding of the complex binary between Morgan and the Dame du Lac as well, since even Mary's role is complicated in Gawain and the Green Knight. After all, Gawain's prayer for shelter reveals the very castle where Morgan resides and plans to test him, and thus "they are both agents of Gawain's testing" (115). Again I would like more analysis of the contradictions, though I think that the sheer breadth of material covered by the chapter (and the book) makes it inevitable that some moments will leave readers wanting more.

Chapter six takes on Morgan's role in the next major Arthurian text, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, where “Morgan la Fey reaches her zenith as a nefarious figure determined to destroy Camelot" (137). Yet, as the chapter also points out, Morgan remains the one to conduct Arthur to Avalon. Since the mother/lover opposition has been important to Pérez's framework, there could have been more explicit discussion of the dichotomy between this healer aspect and Morgan's sexual assertiveness. The chapter does a wonderful job of connecting both her sexual advances toward men (and the way in which women give and take swords such as Excalibur) back to the sovereignty goddesses discussed earlier. The chapter also makes clear how Morgan and Nymue both function as part of this tradition. Though they work against each other, they also serve similar roles in the text. Pérez addresses in detail some of my questions about the Dame du Lac from chapter four when she discusses Nymue's imprisonment of Merlin. Nymue may be Morgan's opponent, and she may work for Arthur more than against him, but she and Morgan both hold similarly powerful positions in the text.

Chapter seven, which discusses how the tradition developed in the Victorian period, explains how Nymue became Vivien. Tennyson depicts Vivien's entrapment of Merlin as an illustration of the dangerously sexualized and educated woman. Pérez explains that there was not only a dichotomy between good and bad women in Victorian society, but also between the Fallen Woman, “depicted in Victorian society as a passive victim,” and the femme fatale, “an active subject, a perpetrator” (163). The chapter argues that Vivien “retains her origins as the femme fatale: the Sovereignty Goddess in her death guise” (164). The discussion of Pre-Raphaelite artists, accompanied by helpful black-and-white images, adds further complexity to the chapter. These artists often chose working-class women and even prostitutes as models, subsequently trying to educate and rehabilitate them. This background gives us examples of male artists directly engaging with real women as they worked through their troubled responses to the characters and stories explored throughout the book.

Chapter eight takes us up to modern culture and notes that "Morgan la Fey has reappeared during the past two centuries at moments of cultural change in the definition of Woman, female sexuality, or motherhood—and their corresponding legal ramifications" (183). This chapter brings the book full circle to the ways in which contemporary anxieties shape modern depictions of Morgan, thus reinforcing how vital the topic remains. The discussion of T.H. White’s Once and Future King works particularly well within the book’s psychoanalytical framework. Pérez discusses White’s problems with his own mother, Constance White, whom he freely admitted was one of the inspirations for his characterizations of Morgause (188). I had been wondering why the book had not discussed Morgause’s role in the tradition earlier, but it makes sense to bring her in here with analysis of White. A mention that she would be discussed in more depth later would have been useful, but this chapter does a good job looking at her transformation in the literature from the Vulgate Cycle to Malory to White. The chapter then gives a tour of modern literature, film, theater, television, and comic books, concluding that “ambivalent feelings toward maternal and feminine power (especially over men) are as pertinent in cultural production today as a thousand years ago” (206).

When reading the first chapters of the book I was concerned that statements about "the subjectivity of all men" seem to universalize male anxieties and gender roles (55). But what becomes increasingly clear as the book progresses is not that specific roles or feelings remain unchanged, but rather that Morgan repeatedly functions as a touchstone for anxieties about women. The book takes on such a complex topic and deals with such a wide range of materials that it’s inevitable that individual readers will crave more in certain areas. And I would have loved signposting to let readers know when something mentioned in passing would return for further discussion later. Overall, though, Pérez brings together Celtic myth and comic book with ease, showing us the ways in which Morgan herself is a once and future queen. The wide scope of the book will make it appealing to scholars of the medieval and medievalist alike. The level of psychoanalytical theory might make it difficult at first for the enthusiast, but the richness of Pérez’s study would reward anyone interested in Arthurian literature, gender studies, or Morgan la Fey.

Kristi J. Castleberry

University of Rochester