Shining Light on our Ladies - Lena of Tirvan and her author Marian L. Thorpe

A series where my guests are female writers 

talking about their female characters

(and yes, I'll be doing the chaps next!)

Today: 

Part I

Lena of Tirvan

from

The Ladies of Empire’s Legacy I: 

Marian L Thorpe 

This spring, we’d outfitted Doveie and passed from apprentices into craftswomen. Fully adult now, part of the village council, we addressed all women as equals, could form Festival alliances and bear children, or just slip Dovekie’s moorings some morning to sail away into adventure. All this could happen in the secure village world we had grown up in and had taken for granted would continue forever.

When we first meet Lena, the protagonist and narrator of my Empire’s Legacy trilogy, she’s not quite eighteen. She’s a year into adulthood, so in modern-day terms, you might want to think of her as having the maturity of a young woman in her early 20’s. The setting is a world similar to northern Europe in about the 7th century.

Lena is a fisherwoman, and with her partner Maya she sails a small fishing boat called Dovekie. She apprenticed for five years, along with Maya, to learn the skills and be ready for their own fishing boat.  She likes fishing, being out on the sea, but there’s part of Lena that longs for adventure. She likes to explore new coves, look for new places to fish.

In Lena’s land, known only as The Empire, women and men live completely separate lives. It’s an underpopulated land, for reasons that become clearer later in the series, and it’s based loosely on the structure of Sparta. Men serve in the army from the time they are seven; women farm and fish and feed the nation. Twice a year, spring and autumn, men return to the villages at a time known as Festival. Outside those two weeks, most women are partnered in work and life with other women, as Lena and Maya are.

But the spring just before Lena turns eighteen, a soldier rides into her village with an audacious request: that women learn to fight. Their land is threatened by an invading army, one the men alone believe they cannot fight off. Lena’s decision to learn to fight is at odds with Maya’s, who believes fighting is the province of men. Maya’s choice, which is against the majority decision of the village, means that she is outcast.

Lena is devastated, and frightened for Maya, but she believes that in choosing to defend her village and her land she has done the right thing, that the history and existence of her land is more important than her individual happiness. She grieves and worries, subsuming her emotions in the work she must do. We see her learn to fight, we see her learn to lead, and we see her learn to kill. She becomes friends with a new resident of the Village, the potter Tice, who has secrets of her own and came from far away. Learning even a little of the wider world beyond her village is a turning point for Lena: she vows to look for Maya, if, after the fighting is done, the invaders have been vanquished.

Lena’s decision to learn to fight in book 1 of the trilogy, Empire’s Daughter, is only the beginning. Its repercussions will, over the entire trilogy, take her to lands that she had no idea existed, into peril and finally into exile – and she will play a role in her country’s history she could never have foreseen.

The Complete Trilogy

Empire’s Daughter:  
https://relinks.me/B00TXFTZ3G

Empire’s Legacy omnibus edition: https://relinks.me/B08154VVP1


Part II - click here

Full Guest List

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