The Mists of Avalon is Malory retold from the other side of the room. Every event is his: Uther and Igraine, the sword, Arthur's marriage, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Grail, Mordred, and the barge to Avalon. What Bradley changes is the point of view and therefore the meaning. Morgaine, a villain in Malory, is the narrator; Guinevere's piety is a character rather than a fault; and the Grail quest reads as the moment Christianity finishes displacing the older religion the women serve, which in Malory is simply the good ending. It did for Arthurian fiction what Wide Sargasso Sea did for Jane Eyre, and almost every feminist retelling of a legend since works the same way.