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"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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