The volume compiles all but one of Moore's stories featuring the title character, a female warrior in an imagined version of medieval France.

Donald M. Grant published an illustrated hardcover edition in 1977, under the title Black God's Shadow.

In 2007, a British omnibus combining Jirel of Joiry with Moore's "Northwest Smith" stories appeared as Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams.

A sixth story, "Quest of the Starstone", written in collaboration with Henry Kuttner, teamed Jirel with Moore's science fiction hero Northwest Smith.

[1][2] Algis Budrys noted that while the Jirel stories were among Moore's earliest work, they remained effective more than thirty years later because "the events which occur to Jirel, as she struggles with the half-understood forces of darkness in her quasi-medieval world, are all things that play on the heart of what being you and me is all about.