THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MODERN FANTASY BY WOMEN

Introduction by Joanna Russ, Edited by A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones, Viking 1995, 560 pages.

Fantasy has come to mean different things to different people – for some it is a descent into the unconscious, an expression of repressed fears or desires; for others it is an exploration of new territories, frightening and fertile landscapes inhabited by playful and provocative beings who draw the reader into a fascinating web of morality and myth. In her challenging Introduction, Joanna Russ describes Fantasy as ‘ the most realistic of all the arts, expressing as it does the contents of human souls directly’.

This anthology aims to show that Fantasy has also been an important vehicle for women, who have used it to express their creative diversity, without having to be boxed in and categorized by a male-dominated literary establishment. Modern Fantasy follows on from Classic Fantasy; it contains thirty-eight stories from 1941 to the present, spanning over fifty years of women’s dreams, thoughts and aspirations.

Alongside stories from well-known authors such as Daphne du Maurier, Muriel Spark, Margaret Atwood, P.D. James, Fay Weldon, Ursula K.Le Guin and Angela Carter, are a number of new voices from the English-speaking world. The diversity of the collection can be gauged by some of the titles – from the culinary (‘ Prodigal Pudding’, ‘Trial by Teaspoon’ and ‘Death in the Egg’), to the intensely sexual (‘Baby, You were Great’, ‘Red as Blood’ and ‘Wives’), Exploring a vast range of complex emotions and their imaginative expression through fantasy, this will become the definitive anthology of an often neglected genre.

Apart from the jacket having been price clipped, both the dust jacket and the book are in very good condition.