Gillian Bradshaw's Arthurian Trilogy

Gillian Bradshaw was born in America in 1956 and is well known for her historical and historical fantasy novels. She spent some time in Chile, then studied at the University of Michigan.  After that, she did a further degree at Cambridge where she met her husband.  She settled in England and wrote her first novels, the Arthurian Trilogy know as “Down the Long Wind”. (She later turned to Classical Greece and Rome, and wrote another novel (Island of Ghosts) about Britain, during the Roman Empire.) But her first works are among my favourite Arthurian tales. Her novels have fantasy elements, involving Morgawse, Arthur’s half-sister, and Gwalchmai, her son, but it is mostly set in a realistic Dark Ages Britain, with Arthur portrayed as a warrior who has been “raised to the Purple” and taken the title of Emperor of Britain, and tried to Unite the warring British small kingdoms against the Saxons.
 Arthur is not a king but a “bastard reared at a monastery”, the son of Uther, the former king. He is married to Gwynhwyfar, the daughter of a Romanized nobleman. Medraut in this novel as in much of the legend is the son of Morgawse by her half-brother, whom she seduced because she wanted to destroy his kingship. In this trilogy, Gwynhwyfar’s affair is with Bedwyr, since Lancelot was not an original character in the legends... So some authors have chosen to use Bedwyr as “Arthur’s friend with who becomes his wife’s lover”. Bradshaw gives a picture of Dark Ages Britain, and sticks closely to the lines the traditional Arthurian story, with Medraut fomenting trouble in Camlann, setting the warriors at odds and revealing Bedwyr’s affair, so that he splits the kingdom. While Arthur is abroad he seizes power, and then fights his father, but both men are killed during the Battle of Camlann. Gwynhwyfar becomes a nun…and later an abbess of a convent in Northern Britain....