Jirel of Joiry - the first female fantasy warrior

https://www.blackgate.com/jirel-of-joiry-the-mother-of-us-all/ Quoting:

In the influential anthology Sword and Sorceress (DAW 1984), editor Marion Zimmer Bradley dedicated the collection of fantasy with female heroes to C. L. Moore, “who gave us Jirel of Joiry, the first woman to take up her sword against sorcery. And to all of us who grew up wanting to be Jirel.”

The red-haired, yellow-eyed, and lioness-fierce sword-wielding Jirel has an unassailable place in contemporary popular culture . . . Fantasy, science fiction, and horror no longer have “Males Only” signs over their doors, either for their warriors or writers. So many female authors and protagonists thrive in speculative fiction today that it seems hard to imagine a time when the opposite was the case. It feels impossible to visualize fantasy before Catherine Lucille Moore broke down the gender barriers (even if she did partially disguise her sex behind her first initials, C. L.) and brought with her Jirel. Beautiful, fierce, loyal, defiant, passionate Jirel did more than raise her sword against sorcery. She slashed through the confining walls around speculative fiction and let it reach toward the horizons in a way it never could have before her advent. That achievement alone assures Jirel and her creator a place in the firmament of the stars of fantasy literature.



. . . More than sixty years after she first debuted in the pages of Weird Tales, she stills makes most contemporary fantasy heroines look like pale carbon copies . . . Part of Jirel’s continuing effectiveness stems from the immense writing talent of C. L. Moore. Moore made her publishing debut in Weird Tales in November 1933 with the oddly titled story “Shambleau.” At the time, Catherine Moore was twenty-two years old and working as a secretary at a bank in Indianapolis; she had worked at writing for fifteen years, starting during her sickly childhood, but she never submitted anything until “Shambleau.” . . . Moore knew how to write an exciting story, but she delivered her tales with something more than just thrills: she served up a baroque portrait of human nature, illuminated in prose that could make readers almost drop the magazine in astonishment.



. . . Writing about a sword-and-sorcery heroine-the very first-allowed Moore to exercise her emotionally charged writing style to its fullest extent. The mixture of the developing genre of sword-and-sorcery with her poetic and humanistic approach created a unique series of fantasy masterpieces. When we read intelligent, cerebral, and emotional sword-and-sorcery today (the kind its harshest critics claim cannot possibly exist) we are witnessing the legacy of Jirel of Joiry.

Jirel belongs to sword-and-sorcery, but she is not a female Conan, as some people have tried pigeonhole her (people who, I can only assume, never read a word of C. L. Moore in their lives and may have gleaned the name ‘Jirel of Joiry’ from a list of fantasy heroines.) Jirel’s stories do not emphasize deliriously paced sword-swinging action or bloody to-the-death contests with horrific beasts. Even though Moore adored such writers as Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, she did not write in their style of the swashbuckler or the violent battle epic. The focus in the six stories of Jirel is on the heroine’s emotional willpower instead of her sword skill or muscle-power. The reader does see Jirel in action as a warrior and a fierce leader, but her ultimate success usually depends not on her fighting prowess, but on a combination of her fortitude and emotional receptivity.

. . . C. L. Moore made Jirel a fully developed female character, not a generic woman warrior. Even though an extraordinary woman in any day and age, Jirel contains contradictions that make her a flesh-and-blood person, a type of character we still see too rarely in heroic fantasy. Jirel loves passionately and hates feverishly, and she finds herself sometimes torn between her duty as the feudal lord of Joiry and her deepest and darkest passions. She will let no man force himself on her, but she admits that she knows the ways of casual romance, and-within the bounds of 1930s publishing standards-enjoys sex: “She remembered laughter and singing and gayety…she remembered kisses in the dark, and the hard grip of men’s arms about her body.”

. . . Jirel braves hellish worlds, yet finds herself shedding tears for the denizens of these vile places. She travels willingly into nightmares to aid someone who insulted her in the deepest way imaginable. She practices torture in her role as the mistress of a castle (she even considers herself a ‘connoisseur’ of torture), yet she cannot tolerate to see a man she believes betrayed her suffer from magical torment. Jirel’s heart pulls her two directions at once.

Jirel’s world and her adventures are as unique as she. As the Lady of Joiry, a fictional demesne in a France that wavers in time from the Dark Ages to the early Renaissance, Jirel has an aggressive duty to and protectiveness of her vassals and people. She sometimes proudly considers herself ‘Joiry,’ an identification she makes a number of times. She rides in full armor to lead her warriors, and they give her the same ironclad respect they would to a man. But Jirel spends scant time among the affairs of the everyday medieval world. In all but one of the stories, Jirel travels to otherworldly realms and dimensions to face body and soul-searing horror. Moore’s potent word sorcery spins her heroine into places beyond imagining.

. . . Moore wrote six stories about Jirel between 1934 and 1939. All except for “Quest of the Starstone” have made numerous appearances in anthologies. Together they compose the book Jirel of Joiry (Del Rey) and half of the Fantasy Masterworks volume Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (Gollancz). After 1939, Moore (in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner) turned increasingly toward science fiction. With Kuttner’s death in 1958, her fiction work practically ceased aside from some television writing. She died from Alzheimer’s disease in 1987 after a long period in a coma. She left behind only these six stories of Jirel of Joiry, the mother of female sword-and-sorcery. Somehow, they are enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirel_of_Joiry


An excerpt from Black God's Kiss:

That sounds really cool. I will buy if I can... XD