She remains popular in North America and Europe because of her “ability to humanize historical and mythological subjects with eloquence, humor and compassion”.

Growing up and living with her mother and her grandmother and witnessing her parents’ marital difficulties roused a natural feminism in Walton which appears throughout her writings.

As a child, Walton enjoyed the works of L. Frank Baum, James Stephens, Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood, which she would later cite as influences on her fiction.

Walton said of her knack for writing fantasy: “My own method has always been to try to put flesh and blood on the bones of the original myth; I almost never contradict sources, I only add and interpret.”[1] In 1991, she underwent surgery for a brain tumor that proved benign.

Some of Walton's papers from 1936 to 1984—including biographic material, manuscripts and the correspondence with Powys—are archived in Special Collections at the Library, University of Arizona in Tucson.

But when I was a child, old folk remembered the Waltons as very tall, very dark people, too full of restless energy to fit quietly into their peaceful little Quaker community: a vivid, turbulent note in it."

Although receiving warm praise from John Cowper Powys, the book sold poorly and none of the other novels in the series reached print at the time.

The rights to Walton’s Mabinogi work were purchased by Stevie Nicks in the hopes of bringing the epic to the big screen.

In 1956, she published The Cross and the Sword, a historical novel set during the Danish conquest of England and the destruction of its Celtic culture.