Through the eyes of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s characters, I learned about patriarchal domination, gender inequality, slut-shaming, religious persecution, bigotry, and heterosexism. It wasn’t just lush scenery and detailed sexual acts (although that made for great reading, too).

Little injustices that I always had a nagging suspicion were unfair were described for the first time I could remember.

Looking back, it wasn’t much of a rebellion, but it felt subversive to a sheltered girl from a conservative home. She didn’t know it, but, in what may have been the first rebellious act of my young life, I was already well into the story. She held out for weeks before agreeing to a compromise: I had to wait until she had read it first, then abide by her final judgment. Never had I wanted to read any book more than I wanted to read The Mists of Avalon. I found myself making excuses to wander past it touching the embossed cover carefully opening it to read a few pages of the prologue when no one was looking. I saw it sitting on my mother’s armoire every day. The Mists of Avalon had become my forbidden fruit. As far as my mother was concerned, the book was off limits. Instead, the neighbor warned her that The Mists of Avalon was chock full of pagan sex rituals and therefore bound to corrupt me. My mother asked her neighbor about the book, probably hoping for the comforting reassurance that this was appropriate reading material for her twelve-year-old daughter. During one of these lunch-hour mythology discussions, she said to me, “I bet you’d love The Mists of Avalon.” The next day, she brought her copy to school with her for me to borrow, with the caveat that I should run it by my mother first. The teacher knew I had an abiding love for the King Arthur legends. At school, my favorite lunchtime activity was sitting in the classroom of a sympathetic teacher and discussing books with her. I was a twelve-year-old social pariah and I had probably read every Arthurian book in our (admittedly limited) middle school library.

The mists of avalon book