Who is Marion Zimmer Bradley

The 1960's were a peculiar time in human history. Marion Zimmer Bradley was at the heart of that. Her work bears the stamp of its concerns with the environment, women's rights and feminism (and it's ideals of lesbian love) as well as the burgeoning alternative spirituality of that era.

This lens goes into each of those topics.

In her Darkover series, Marion Zimmer Bradley created a world with a very fragile ecological balance. Right in the first novel it is made clear that anybody who wants to live on that world needs to keep the ecology in mind in everything they do.

Large plots of land can't be deforested without immediate replanting, because if that's not done, the mountains will lose their fin toplayer of soil and become bare, unfit for human use. In later novels human wars on the planet, helped on by magic in ways reminiscent of the nuclear weapons developed in the 20th century, make whole areas unlivable for generations.

In all Bradleys books psy powers play a part. In the Mists of Avalon these are referred to as 'the sight' and the most significant power is that of clairvoyance. In Darkover all kinds of psy powers play a part: transmutation of metals, clairvoyance of all kinds and also ways to physically defend yourself or even attack others. In the Light series all this is mixed in with ritual magic.

The word feminist has become controversial. Women of my generation don't want to be associated with the radical feminism of the 1960's and 70's - mainly because it wasn't a fashionable type of woman that got portrayed. Cut hair and baggy pants, who wants to be associated with that?

Marion Zimmer Bradley's generation paved the way for our freedom.

They made it clear that relationships between men and women should be based on equality. That cloths worn to please a man, take away something of the power of the woman in and of herself. Woman can be mothers and housewives, but they can also be scientists, artists and business women.

Darkover is a very patriarchal world - in which Bradley focuses on the lives of the women. By making the contrast perhaps bigger than it was at the time (certainly bigger than I've actually experienced it in my time) she lets the dynamic of the social conversation of her time play out.

She doesn't sound like a radical in her books. She clearly recognizes that many women like being mothers. She recognizes that marriages sometimes work, despite obvious troubles. She recognizes the risks people take who step out of socially acceptable roles into a position that gets created as they go. It is clear that not everybody should be expected to take such a plunge.

In the series of books Bradley wrote about the paganism of Great Britain, she clearly struggles between the Christianity that is brought to the land and the paganism that is there already.

For a time she called herself a pagan, but in her last years she attended an Episcopal church and left the neo-pagan tradition for others to discover.

Her most famous book 'The Mists of Avalon' was the outcome of an attempt at teaching Christians an appreciation of women and female spirituality.

What's most curious is that people actually take her book 'The mists of Avalon' seriously enough to take it literal in their wicca (modern witchcraft) ritual work! This does not mean they will curse people, but that in many cases they will use the rituals in this series and the types of clothing in the movie as they do their wicca rituals. Some of the people who do that believe the whole book is literally true. Others don't, but don't care about that side of it.

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