Love Quote by Tanith Lee

There is a particular kind of candor in admitting influence, especially for a writer like Tanith Lee whose voice arrived so fully formed that readers often treat it as sui generis. By saying she “love[s] writers all across the board,” Lee disarms the anxious hierarchy-making that shadows literary talk: high versus low, genre versus “literary,” prestige versus pleasure. It’s a cosmopolitan flex that also reads like self-defense. She’s refusing to be pinned to a single lineage even as she’s about to name one.

Then she does: “one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.” The specificity matters. “Very directly” is a claim of craft, not just admiration. Renault, famed for her lucid, sensual historical novels of ancient Greece, offered a model for how to smuggle transgressive intimacy and psychological complexity into settings that look safely “classical.” For a young Lee coming up in a culture that still treated fantasy and science fiction as second-class, Renault’s approach is a quiet permission slip: you can write desire, myth, violence, and beauty with seriousness and narrative velocity; you can build worlds that feel researched without sounding dutiful.

The phrase “at the beginning” also signals evolution. Lee isn’t living under Renault’s shadow; she’s mapping an origin point. Subtextually, she’s telling you how an imaginative life gets made: not from pure inspiration, but from finding one predecessor who makes the door feel usable, then walking through it into your own stranger rooms.