The Lasting Legacy of Tanith Lee, Daughter of the Night

By LCW Allingham and River Eno

When my co-editor and I decided to put together an anthology of Grimm fairy tales, retold as horror stories, there was a story that kept playing through my head. “Skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood.” A story of Snow White where the beautiful young princess was not the virtuous joy to the world, but the horror that had been there between the lines of the classic tale all along.

That story was, aptly titled, “Red as Blood,” and it was Tanith Lee who revealed the true nature of the beloved princess to the world, in 1983, in a collection by the same name. Tanith Lee revealed many secret truths during her prolific sixty-seven years on Earth. Some ideas were very new and some very old. Readers often reacted strongly to her work, one way or another.

Allison Rich currently manages the official bibliography of Tanith Lee and website, daughterofthenight.com. She was a close friend, and Lee personally asked her to help preserve her legacy. She says of Lee:

“…She wrote for herself and if people liked it and bought it she was very happy they liked it. If not, she didn’t care. She did, however, know that she was a great writer with a very strong voice. People like good writing and her writing was good. She could pack a punch like being hit in the stomach with a velvet glove full of rocks.”

Tanith Lee, born in 1947, was a speculative fiction writer who also wrote science fiction and fantasy, poems, screenplays and a children’s book. She became famous for her interpretations of vampire stories and fairy tales, weaving in themes of feminism and sexuality. Amassing a collection of over 90 novels and 300 short stories from the beginning of her career in 1968. 

Inspired by playwrights, painters, movies and music, Lee also wrote lesbian fiction under the pseudonym Esther Garber. Using a wide range of subject matter, Lee’s stories examine relationships between self-destruction and creativity. They examine sexuality and psychosis, female subjugation and the power of myth. 

Her stories resonate throughout time. Universal and transformative. Fantasy author Cecilia Dart-Thornton recalled how she first discovered Tanith Lee’s work.

“When I was in my early teens, my mother introduced me to Tanith Lee’s work. Instantly, I fell in love with her exquisite prose style and glorious stories. I think the book was ‘Drinking Sapphire Wine/Don’t Bite the Sun.’. Reading it was a life-changing experience. After marvelling at this enthralling tale, I was driven to find every other book written by Tanith Lee.”

According to Rich, Lee didn’t write her stories so much as channel them, as if they were accounts from previous lives. She never made the transition to a computer, always preferring to write pen to paper. For the most part, her numerous acquiring editors didn’t mind doing the transcriptions in house. While she continued to write as much as ever, in the 90’s Lee’s publishing career hit a lull. In 2012 she told an interviewer that she thought this was financially driven, as publishers no longer thought her work would sell due to changing markets.

Allison Rich says her stories still found purchase where it counted. “The editors who loved her work promoted it and bought her stories and novels. Publishers who respected her work bought her stories and novels. But it was never a mass movement.”

The rise and expansion of indie publishing embraced Tanith Lee and her work wholeheartedly, although much of her extensive library remains out of print. While traditional publishing attention ebbed and flowed, her fans remained steadfast, with more falling under her spell every year, and she continued to receive recognition from her fellow authors. 

Amongst the dozens of awards she received, she was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, also known as the August Derleth Award for her 1980 book, Death’s Master. She won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror in 2015, the year of her passing.

This year, she was recognized by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association with the second ever Infinity Award, a Lifetime Achievement award, presented at the June 2024 Nebula Awards.

Jeffe Kennedy, SFWA President, said, “Tanith Lee was writing combinations of science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, queerness, and sex long before the current trends. She was a true trailblazer in multiple cross-genres and influenced so many of today’s authors. It’s a sorrow to me that she passed before we could celebrate her as she should have been, but a bittersweet joy to at least be able to give her this honor today.”

She is also being honored in the upcoming anthology Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology from editors Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney. SFF titans like Terri Windling and Martha Wells are contributing stories to the collection.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton could not overstate how profound Lee’s writing was to her as an author. “These words, selected and arranged in ways that produced in me a sense of wonder, an upwelling of emotions, and a virtual explosion of vibrant, magnificent colours (for of all writers, she is the one who evokes every hue of the spectrum). When reading Lee, my brain seemed to become saturated with a flood of molten stained-glass or jewellery.”

It seems Lee’s vivid imagery of dark feminine power has once again found its hold in a generation of women and marginalized people looking for a voice to speak to their hope and angers, the frustrations seething beneath the surface, and the glorious fire that is burning within them.

But Tanith Lee’s legacy isn’t just velvet punches, molten gems and shadow of flames.

It is also that of a mentor and a very dear friend.

In 1992, Tanith Lee married artist and writer John Kaiine, and the two welcomed fledgling authors and creatives from all over the world into their circle. 

“I wrote her a fan letter, never expecting a reply, just wishing to pay tribute to the Daughter of the Night. She wrote back, to my absolute delight and amazement, and we continued to correspond over the years. I travelled to England, where I met her and her talented husband, John Kaiine, who, to my delight, also became my friend,” Dart-Thornton recalled of her friendship with Lee.

In 2016, close friends of Tanith Lee, including Cecilia Dart-Thornton, put together Night’s Nieces, to honor their dear friend. Dart-Thornton’s website explains “Its title inspired by Tanith’s Flat Earth sequence of books, (in particular Night’s Master), Night’s Nieces is a collection of stories by female writers, who not only counted Tanith Lee as a close friend, but also as a mentor, a teacher and an inspiration. Tanith, having no children herself, considered these younger women to be her ‘nieces’ and offered her support to their writing. While the ‘nieces’ included in this book do not encompass all of Tanith’s close writer friends – for she had many – it amply provides a sample of her legacy.”

Tanith Lee passed from breast cancer, in May 2015, in her East Sussex home. While her work continues to appear in reprints all over the world and continues to inspire authors, playwrights, musicians, artists and readers, Allison Rich shared that she left a little bit of her magic for her friends as well.

“On the night / morning she died, I was staying with friends at their house in Maine and I woke up to a bird flapping around in their house … When I got home, there was an email [from John Kaiine] that Tanith had died that morning. It’s an old Celtic myth that if there is a bird trapped in your house that someone will die. I take that as Tanith visiting me – it’s something that she would have loved to have done and found it funny.”

You can find out more about Tanith Lee and her complete bibliography at http://daughterofthenight.com/

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology at https://tanith-lee-tribute.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

And find out which of her stories is featured in Grimm Retold at https://www.speculationpub.com/grimm-retold

Ceclia Dart-Thornton’s website: https://dartthornton.com/