"Great is Diana"


    "Great is Diana" is a tale about exotic survivals and polymastia told as a "club story," i.e., Avram Davidson does The Runagates Club in a later, less gentlemanly milieu.
     Jim Lucas recounts the story of Mr. Henry Taylor, nineteenth-century English missionary expatriate and his adventure in not so ancient Greece (Asia Minor, actually, near the site of the ancient city of Ephesus) : his encounter with Diana the Huntress is no ordinary topless experience. 
     Compare Dunsany's Jorkens stories, "The Development of the Rillswood Estate" and "A Doubtful Story" ; also John Buchan's  "Basilissa" (1914) or his novel The Dancing Floor (1926) ; and John Crowley's "Missolonghi 1824," a more self-consciously literary adventure in which Lord Byron meets a holdover from ancient times.
      "Great is Diana" was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1958, and collected in Or All the Seas With Oysters.

     The illustration, from a leaflet (circa 1930s) advertising a Panurge Press limited edition of Bestiality by Gaston DuBois-Desaulle, forms part of "the collection of a gentleman."

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