Her face “might not have been fair in a woman’s head-dress” and she’s given some traditionally masculine traits (she’s tall, strong and her hair is cut short. Nor does Moore present her as particularly beautiful. There is no superficial sexuality in the Jirel stories Jirel doesn’t sport a chain-mail bikini (except in some cover art of course). The reader is in theory part of that audience.
She is stepping into that usually male place. Jirel is introduced as a nameless commander, and only when other knights remove her helmet is everyone surprised to find out that she is a woman. In fact, by writing about a female warrior who makes deliberate choices and takes violent action to determine her fate, she shows that there is space for that in the subgenre. She’s got to have red hair! How else are we to know that she is a fierce warrior? But Moore does not follow every convention. Fierce, strong, proud and in line with the idealisation of figures like Boudica and Joan of Arc. Jirel embodies all the recognisable elements of a warrior queen stereotype.
The fifth story, “ Quest of the Starstone”, isn’t present in every edition of this collection, but it is an interesting one because it pairs Jirel with another Moore hero from another series: a Han-Solo-like roguish space smuggler with the impossibly awesome name of Northwest Smith. “Quest of the Starstone” (1937), with Henry Kuttner.Moore wrote six short stories starring her sword-and-sorcery queen warrior, one of which she wrote together with her husband Henry Kuttner, who was a successful science fiction writer in his own right at the time. The Jirel of Joiry collection was put together and published in 1969 but the stories inside them all stem from the 1930s when they appeared in the Weird Tales pulp magazine, alongside those of Howard and only a few years after his first Conan stories. Jirel is a queen in a medieval version of France, whose adventures frequently take her to dimensions of Hell. Lovecraft was writing, and we get the stories of Jirel of Joiry. Add to that some of the cosmic horror that H.P. Moore, who as one of the few female authors of fantasy fiction at the time, felt compelled as the Conan stories came out to write a female version. As his Conan stories began to appear in the Weird Tales pulp magazine, so many writers felt compelled to either write homages to the stories or write something in contrast to them. Howard made such a splash with his sword-and-sorcery writing.
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