Betsy Wollheim Remembers Tanith Lee
Revered fantasist Tanith Lee, author of more than 90 novels and hundreds of short stories, and the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, died May 24 after a long illness. Her passing leaves a gaping hole in the lives of the readers who adored her novels, particularly her Tales from the Flat Earth saga.
But her loss is most keenly felt by those who knew her personally. Today, Betsy Wollheim is the publisher of venerable genre publishing House DAW books, but in the ’70s, she was an editor working for her father, DAW namesake Donald A. Wollheim. It was DAW that acquired Lee’s 1975 debut novel, The Birthgrave, after many publishers had already rejected it. It went on to be nominated for the Nebula Award, and began a fruitful partnership between author and publishing house.
DAW released more than 20 novels from Lee over the next two decades. The arrival of her latest manuscripts at the office became a cherished event for Betsy, who, in her own words, remembers a great friend and storyteller:
A Memory
When I think of Tanith, I think of nighttime. I remember the hot summer nights when we ran around Manhattan propelled by the exuberance of youth. But I also remember sitting alone in the dark, empty office reading manuscripts long after closing time.
Tanith’s manuscripts were the only ones we never took home. Typed on fragile onionskin (to save postage cost from the U.K.), they had to be hand-copied, page by laborious page. Tanith’s originals were written in longhand, and nearly impossible to decipher. The typescript we received was painstakingly transcribed, first by Tanith’s mother, herself a writer, and in later years by Tanith herself. I’ll never forget the times I saw Tanith writing—she was like a person possessed.
And when a Tanith Lee manuscript came into the DAW offices, we were like editors possessed. Don always read it first, and the frustration of waiting for him to be done was nearly unbearable. When it was my turn, nothing could interrupt me. I stayed in the office until I read to the very last page, often not returning home until the wee hours of the morning. Leaving our dark and eerily deserted midtown offices near dawn, I used to feel like Tanith’s heroine from The Birthgrave, her first DAW book: a girl emerging from a volcano into a strange, alien land.
Betsy Wollheim
May, 2015
Tanith Lee was born in England in 1947. She learned to read at a late age, but once she could, she became a voracious reader and writer. She published her first novella at 21, and a children’s fantasy, The Dragon Hoard, in 1971. The Birthgrave was her first novel for adults. Her 1980 book Death’s Master won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award. Also a winner of two World Fantasy Awards for Best Short Story, Lee received a lifetime achievement award from the WFA Convention in 2013, and similar honors from the Horror Writers’ Association in 2015.
She was 67 years old. She will be missed.