All the stories were published in Weird Tales during the 1930s. The volume compiles all but one of Moore's stories featuring the title character, a female warrior in an imagined version of medieval France. Moore, often characterized as sword and sorcery. If this is the case, the Jirel stories make a central contribution feminist SF and their value should be acknowledged as equal to that of Moore's other stories. Jirel of Joiry is a collection of five fantasy stories by C. One of the finest early contributors to Weird Tales, she helped define and create the sword-&-sorcery genre alongside Robert E. Her performance of masculinity is significant because of the era in which the Jirel tales were published, and may well constitute the first appearance of a female masculinity in SF. Moore, one of the pioneering women writers of speculative fiction, and the appearance of fantasys landmark female hero. She sometimes proudly considers herself ‘Joiry,’ an identification she makes a number of times. I demonstrate that her performance of masculinity is channelled by the warrior role she plays into traits such as physical strength, authority, sexual agency and an enjoyment of violence. As the Lady of Joiry, a fictional demesne in a France that wavers in time from the Dark Ages to the early Renaissance, Jirel has an aggressive duty to and protectiveness of her vassals and people. Durham: Duke University Press), as well as recent studies on the female action hero as my theoretical framework, I argue that Jirel presents the reader with a performance of female masculinity. In this article I therefore focus attention on Jirel who is, arguably, the first female warrior to appear in SF. Her tales ‘Shambleau’ (1933) and ‘No Woman Born’ (1944) have attracted some scholarly attention, but the stories that follow the medieval female warrior, Jirel of Joiry (1934–1939), have yet to be addressed in any depth.

Moore is considered a trailblazer of feminist SF because of the short stories she published in the 1930s and 1940s.

Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore