Lee, Tanith (1947– ), prolific English writer of novels, short story collections, radio plays, and television scripts. Born and educated in London, she had completed the manuscripts of several books by the time she was 25. Initially she was known principally as a children's writer, having published The Dragon Hoard (1971), Princess Hynchatti and Some Other Surprises (1972), and a picture book, Animal Castle (1972), although her first published work, The Betrothed (1968), was a collection of short stories for adults. At 25 she began study at an art college, but writing remained her primary focus and she soon became a full‐time writer. Her continued interest in art, especially painting, seems reflected in the powerful visual imagination which characterizes most of her writing. Her career in the 1970s was evenly divided between books for young readers, with nine appearing between 1971 and 1979, and adult fantasies. After Shon the Taken (1982), Lee had appeared to abandon children's writing, but has made an impressive return with Black Unicorn (1991) and Gold Unicorn (1994).
Lee's output is diverse, but the genres which dominate her work are fairy tale, fantasy, and science fiction, often intermingled in very creative ways. Her contribution to fairy tale is of three main kinds: playful original stories for young readers, which adduce familiar conventions for comic or parodic purposes; retellings for an adult audience of classic tales, placing the tales in a new context, or giving them a startling new twist or point of view; or more allusive uses of known tales within other genres, especially fantasy. Her propensity for playing with the fairy tale is quickly evident in her first foray into the genre, The Dragon Hoard. This humorous novel for younger children exploits the comic potential in many fairy‐tale motifs by a mixture of pastiche and absurdity. Prince Jasleth is sent out to seek his fortune in the hope of alleviating a spell cast on himself and his twin sister by a wicked witch who was not invited to their 17th birthday party (and who of course still bore a grudge over being left out of the christening), but discovers that all the fairy‐tale quests he expects have been performed years ago, and the quest he finally joins (itself a parody of the story of the Argonauts) becomes a series of comic adventures. The novel has more than its quota of talking animals, helpers and opponents, and is littered with allusions to fairy tales, classical mythology, and the Bible. Storytelling is pushed to an ironic self‐reflective absurdity when the 50 questers, captured by an evil sorcerer, escape by boring him with an utterly pointless fairy tale concocted by passing the story to a new teller every few sentences, with each speaker uttering ‘the first things that came into his head’, pursuing various fairy‐tale schemata in random ways.
Princess Hynchatti and Some Other Surprises continues in a similar vein of absurdity, but now as 12 original fairy tales, alternately about Princesses and Princes. These tales deal with quests solved by ingenuity or cunning, comic or foolish quests undertaken by inept heroes and heroines, helpful talking animals, malicious spells and accidental metamorphoses, and female and male ‘Cinderella’ figures who win happiness not by magic but by intelligence. Throughout these tales, the heroes' victories always affirm particular qualities necessary for their happiness—consideration for others, altruism, humility, thoughtfulness. These values are intrinsic to Lee's human insight, even within her most macabre adult Gothic fantasies.
The adult fairy tales, a good selection of which were gathered together in Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), are parables about the human psyche. The significances of the nine stories in this volume are readily evident in those tales which are reworkings of classics, that is, in ‘Paid Piper’ (‘The Pied Piper’), ‘Red as Blood’ (‘Snow White’), ‘Thorns’ (‘Sleeping Beauty’), ‘When the Clock Strikes’ (‘Cinderella’), ‘The Golden Rope’ (‘Rapunzel’), ‘The Princess and her Future’ (‘The Frog King’), and ‘Beauty’ (‘Beauty and the Beast’). Here the comedy of Lee's children's tales is replaced by grim irony, the blithe archaic settings by medievalist wastelands, Gothic ruins, and deserts of the mind, and the simple conflicts between good and evil are teased out into a kind of psychomachia. Lee's adult writings deal in almost overwhelming emotions, and human desires are figured by supernatural horrors and illuminations. Thus in the opening tale, ‘Paid Piper’, the Piper from Robert Browning's poem subsumes the lost gods of fertility and ecstasy, Pan and Dionysus, and the sterility visited on the village that rejects him symbolizes the aridity of mundane, material lives lived without joy and love for others. The tales evince a pervasive desire for transcendence, but in attributing to human beings an endemic propensity for evil acknowledge a danger that this may be won at the cost of humanity. Elsewhere, in ‘Bloodmantle’ (in Forests of the Night, 1989), a tale loosely connected with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, the main character recognizes that the ghostly werewolf she has met is stranded with ‘no self to become’ and that the human quest is ‘not to find the bestial in humankind, but … to be free of it’. Sometimes in Lee's adult fairy tales characters meet the bestial, in paranormal or supernatural forms, and are devoured by it. Thus ‘The Princess and her Future’—in which the creature from the well fulfils the ‘young and handsome Prince’ cliché but eats his bride on their wedding day—challenges banal psychoanalytic readings of ‘The Frog King’ which assert that the frog, representing a fear of sexuality, will be transformed into an ideal life partner. Conversely, in the science‐fiction retelling of ‘Beauty’ the heroine's relationship with the ‘monster’, who figures a fusion of mind and body transcending mundane existence, lifts her above the superficiality and ennui of aimless being.
Common to all of Lee's fairy tales, whether for children or adults, and whether they explore the positive or negative aspects of human desire, is a faith in what she has elsewhere called ‘the rays of human love and human ability, that are the best of all of us’ (author's foreword to Eva Fairdeath, 1994).
— John Stephens
