I read this just before I came out, and I think it helped influence that decision. Amazons! was probably in my mother’s prodigious SF/F collection – she kept Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, and then Forbidden Planetin business pretty much single-handed. It is dark myth, with an impossible love between a mortal woman and a goddess, with overtones of fairies under the hill and Beauty and the Beast. It made me cry the first time I read it, the tragedy is so utterly inevitable no matter how much you will it otherwise.

First published in Amazons!, ed. Jessica Amanda, Salmonson, 1979, and collected in The Woman Who Loved the Moon, Berkley, 1981