ABSTRACT
With the publication of Guinevere (1981), The Chessboard Queen (1984), and Guinevere Evermore (1985), Sharan Newman became the first writer to produce an Arthurian trilogy on Guinevere, and her contribution has been duly noted. For example in The Return of King Arthur, Taylor and Brewer, who discuss only the first work of the trilogy, point out that Guinevere, “though relatively slight” (320), is a novel which sensitively depicts human interactions, treats Arthurian story and characters both naturally and wittily, and combines fantasy with moving, realistic characterizations and descriptions of the effects of war. Raymond Thompson, in The Return from Avalon, also discusses only Guinevere, but other than faint praise for Newman’s use of the faery world to indicate alienation within a character, he considers the work to be “contrived,” “sentimental,” and “disjointed” (123). There is also an entry on Newman in The Arthurian Encyclopedia (407), but if the length of the discussion of each entry is indicative of its importance to the Arthurian legend, then Amelia Rutledge’s seventy-six-word critique of Newman’s three Arthurian works clearly indicates that the Guinevere trilogy is relatively insignificant. A better understanding and appreciation for Newman’s literary contribution proves otherwise. Prior to Newman’s Guinevere, the first Arthurian work to treat Guinevere’s life before her marriage to Arthur, readers were familiar with a few facts of Guinevere’s early life: she was the beautiful daughter of Leodegrance, a Roman noble, brought up in the household of Cador of Cornwall and given in marriage to Arthur along with her dowry of Uther Pendragon’s Round Table. Using these few facts as a point of departure, Newman creates for Cador, who already had a son (Constantine), a wife (Sidra) and a daughter (Lydia) and then makes Cador a blood relative of Leodegrance. for Guinevere, she invents a mother (Guenlian, a second cousin of Merlin), three older brothers (John, Matthew, and Mark), and a household of servants (notably Princerna, the butler, and Flora, Guinevere’s nurse and grandmother of Caet, the stableboy), and fosterlings (especially Rhianna, the beloved of Matthew).
