Writings
Walton is best known for her four novels retelling the Welsh Mabinogi. She published her first volume in 1936 under the publisher's unfortunate title of The Virgin and the Swine. Although receiving warm praise from John Cowper Powys, the book sold poorly and none of the other novels in the series reached print at the time. Rediscovered by Ballantine's Adult Fantasy series in 1970, it was reissued as The Island of the Mighty. The Children of Llyr followed in 1971, The Song of Rhiannon in 1972 and Prince of Annwn in 1974. All four novels were published in a single volume as The Mabinogion Tetralogy in 2002 by Overlook Press. The four novels are translated and available in several European languages.
Walton's Witch House was written in the mid- to late-1930s and published in 1945 as the first volume in “The Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror”. It is an occult horror story set in New England. In 1956, she published The Cross and the Sword, a novel set during the Danish conquest of England and the destruction of its Celtic culture.
In 1982, Walton published the first of her Theseus trilogy The Sword is Forged. Walton had completed the trilogy in the late 1940s but the publication by Mary Renault of her Theseus novels in 1958 and 1962 kept Walton from publishing her own. The remaining two novels in the trilogy are, as yet, unpublished.
Walton published several short stories. The best-known of these are “Above Ker-Is” (1980), “The Judgement of St. Yves” (1981) and “The Mistress of Kaer-Mor” (1980). She also wrote seven unpublished novels, several volumes of unpublished short stories, poems and a verse play.
Currently Douglas A. Anderson is the agent for Walton's literary works.
Read more about this topic: Evangeline Walton
Famous quotes containing the word writings:
“In this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”
—Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)