My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know. She thought she had never loved him so much as at this moment, when she heard the convent door close, hard and final, and felt the wall shutting her in.
The Mists of Avalon is a 1983 novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which deviates from a lot of previous tellings by:
- Focusing on female points of view.
- Placing the story solidly in the earliest Middle Ages
- Emphasizing a pagan-vs.-Christian dichotomy, with several of the more sinister characters in the legends being reimagined as defenders of an older pagan way of life
For these reasons it can be seen as a more feminist, spiritually-focused, and “historical” take1 - though there’s been more mixed receptions to each aspect over time. A lot of these innovations are more common nowadays, both because of the book’s influence and despite it.
Footnotes
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Here historical is specifically about placing the events in the historical Dark Ages and using thematic elements kind of taken from that period instead of the High Medieval aesthetics and themes often used.. ↩