One thing that even the most privileged and blinkered of us have learnt in 2025 is that history is not a linear process. It’s not just that any reform can be overturned and any right revoked, but that events seem to be confirming Orwell’s warning that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” On this reading, history—which is just a subset of “story”—is a closed-loop feedback system, susceptible to endless manipulation. As Vivian Rolfe, the politician antagonist of Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting, patiently explains to Owen Mallory, the novel’s historian narrator: “There are only two kinds of story worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war. I need the second.” Consequently, she manipulates Owen, as he writes repeated versions of the life and death of the legendary figure Una Everlasting, variously known as “the Queen’s Champion, the Red Knight, the Virgin Saint, [and] the Drawn Blade of Dominion.”
A critical discomfort with fantasy still remains a feature of public life, even though it is at the present moment arguably the dominant English-language genre. In her recent introduction to a US reissue of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 classic, Lolly Willowes, Harrow notes how “neither the charming-satire crowd nor the feminist-parable crowd seems totally comfortable calling Lolly Willowes what it is: a fantasy novel.” Over the summer, New York Times columnist David Brooks created a minor stir by complaining that there was a time “When Novels Mattered,” whereas “today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction.” That fantasy novels are just one entry in a longer list of categories that don’t matter is assumed to be self-evident. How seriously, then, should we take The Everlasting?
The dismissal of fantasy is further compounded by the strategy of rhetorical containment in which novels in the genre by women are singled out and lumped together under one sub-category, such as romantasy, which can then be judged according to different criteria than those normally applied to fiction. For example, the mainstream British press can’t quite decide if the rise of romantasy is a sociological phenomenon or an exercise in soft porn. In February 2025, a Guardian editorial linked the appeal of romantasy to that of Taylor Swift and proclaimed that “Hit novels by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros offer more than sex and escapism. They have reclaimed the fantasy genre for women.” A recent article on the BBC News website, on the other hand, profiled London’s first romance-only bookshop, Saucy Books, which features a “smut hut.” The Daily Mail, as usual, have tried to have it both ways, by simultaneously celebrating a new type of “bonkbuster” focused on “fairy porn” and “explicit sex scenes,” while deploring “How teenage boys are being forced out of reading with new books targeted at girls.” All of these articles could be more or less regarded as objective reportage in terms of their content, but at the same time they function ideologically, compartmentalising not just romantasy but also women’s fantasy in general, prising it apart from what they take to be more serious literature, which they simply wouldn’t discuss in this way. But what if they’re wrong? What if fantasy, specifically women’s fantasy, and even more specifically women’s romantic fantasy is literature that we should take seriously?
The Everlasting is Harrow’s fourth full-length fantasy novel. Her 2019 debut, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, made it on to a very strong Hugo shortlist; The Once and Future Witches (2020) combined spells, murderous anger, and the suffragist movement to powerful effect; Starling House (2023) was a beautifully told slice of southern gothic. And now we have the sustained intoxication of The Everlasting. Four fantasy novels, each different, each better than the last. Harrow’s fiction is not specifically marketed as romantasy, but the fact that she is a woman writing fantasy which features romantic relationships means that she is inevitably caught up in the wider discourse around it. Given that The Everlasting hadn’t yet been published when I started writing this review, I tested this hypothesis with some internet searches for Starling House. The fact that it plays off “Beauty and the Beast” prompted one online reviewer to ask, “Is there such a thing as horror romantasy?” When I started typing “Is Starling House … ” into Google, the query autocompleted with “spicy?”
Personally, I think this is a perfectly valid question to ask. There’s plenty of good reasons why people might want to know this information in advance. However, it’s not a particularly nuanced scale of literary assessment. From a critical perspective, it’s probably more useful to think in terms of more established terminology such as “closed door” or “open door” romance, the key point in a novel of this genre often being when the former becomes the latter. Anyway, I can tell you that Starling House—despite having a hidden locked door in the basement—is not generally regarded as spicy, perhaps scoring one or two out of five on that scale. This works nicely for the protagonists of this engaging tale. However, Starling House also fulfils fantasy’s objective—as explained by Harrow in her introduction to Lolly Willowes—of enlarging and exposing reality, making “the invisible visible, the impossible possible.” In this case, the novel lays bare both the underlying web of relationships and power dynamics of a small town, and sets out the cost of escape.
The Everlasting is a more ambitious novel than its predecessor. It opens with an extract relating the tale of “Una and the Yew,” which tells how a woodcutter finds Una as a baby abandoned under a yew tree and brings her up as his own daughter in a cottage in the woods. Here she lives freely, running and hunting with wild animals, until the day during her twelfth winter when she returns home to find her father slain by the Brigand Prince. She runs to the yew and draws forth the sword that has for time immemorial been buried to the hilt within it. Then she tracks down the Brigand Prince and his men, through the woods and in the snow, before killing them all. In the process, she rescues the king’s daughter and pledges her allegiance to her. In time, the princess will become Queen Yvanne and preside over the legendary golden age of Dominion, a nation built and protected by Una’s military prowess. As this outline suggests, and Owen’s surname implies, there is an element of gender-flipped Arthurian romance here, but The Everlasting cuts much deeper than this.
While Owen gains tenure and then enhanced academic status by writing and rewriting Una’s history, the price he pays is to repeatedly return in time and accompany her through her adventures. It is by changing what happens in the past that he is able to alter the narrative, returning always to a subtly changed present. This is a familiar science-fictional trope, and on one level the story works as a puzzle for Owen to solve (or not) in a manner that is similar to novels such as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) and Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014). However, the seemingly intractable problem that Owen eventually comes to face is not just helping Una escape her fate and stay alive, but the need to break the link between history and nationalism, when every word he writes has the opposite effect in both respects. His cause is not helped by the fact that Una sees him for what he is at their first meeting: “All my life men like you have followed me […] Hounding me, lapping up the blood and begging for more. You have turned all my graves into glory, all my carnage into pretty songs they sing at court.”
It would be so easy for the depiction of Una to collapse into either kickass warrior or bloodthirsty monster. Harrow avoids this potential pitfall by drawing attention to what is at stake. Owen observes how the people of the villages they pass through view her as a thing apart, “neither man nor woman but some third chimerical thing.” Una herself remarks that because of the way she behaves “it is easier for most people if I am not a woman.” But Owen does come to see her as a woman—and desire her—even though he is initially unable to deal with the contradiction in gender norms she represents. The nearest he can come to treating her in the way he wants is by behaving as though he is her squire. As the novel progresses through retellings, including one from Una’s point of view, it slowly unpicks the cathected erotic fantasy of Dominion’s mantra of “one God, one flag, one nation,” while opening up the possibility of an alternative space outside traditional hierarchies.
Although focusing on a very small group of characters—Owen, his drunken dissident father, and the three powerful women in his life (Una, Vivian, and his former doctoral supervisor, Professor Sawbridge)—the stakes are large-scale, universal even. It expresses a rich and sophisticated sexual politics, which means more than just a higher score on the spice count. As the narrator remembers Prof Sawbridge upbraiding him, “if the history you were reading wasn’t filthy then someone had censored the good bits.” However, those obsessed with traditional hierarchies cannot think outside of binary norms. Despite being able to discuss at length the obstacles to her holding power that are created by men’s attitude to women, Vivian can only taunt Owen about the relationship that he develops with Una: “I always wonder how it works between you two. Do you take turns giving the orders?” But sexuality is more complicated than who gets to wear the pants, and it takes Owen and Una most of the novel to work this out. As they do so, they leave not only “their sexes behind,” but even story itself—including the story that is nation.
This is, quite simply, a beautiful novel that will reward reading and rereading. Like her peers, such as Zen Cho and Amal El-Mohtar—who have also expressed their appreciation for women fantasy writers of the 1920s—Harrow demonstrates how we’re still caught up in the same battles of a century ago. We should take this writing very seriously—because it holds open the slender possibility that we might live otherwise than we do if we’re prepared to keep fighting for that opportunity.