The Shattered Chain by Marion Zimmer Bradley

After being disappointed by Lackey's effort, I decided to go back and reread the Bradley that it reminded me of. Actually, this one precedes Thendara House. As I recall - and it has been a number of years since I undertook to reread Darkover - there are occasional references to the Free Amazons in other books, but these two are the only ones which deal with them directly. In this one, the Terran, Magdalen Lorne, is caught disguising herself as a Free Amazon and is required to take oath and make the deception a reality. In Thendara House, we have her year of training.

On Darkover we have the blend of science fiction and fantasy that has become fairly standard these days. McCaffrey's Pern and Shinn's Samaria are examples of the type. Humans have arrived on the world by ship in some unimaginably distant past and from there they have adapted and adapted the place into what is essentially a fantasy setting rather than a scientifically rational setting - but with that underlying sci fi premise. Pern's dragons and Shinn's angels along with Bradley's psi caste all have "rational" causes.

In The Shattered Chain, Bradley sheds light on two of Darkover's unexplored cultures - the barbaric desert dwellers of the Dry Lands and, of course, the Free Amazons. A high caste woman has hired a team of Free Amazons to go to the Dry Lands and rescue her cousin who was kidnapped some years earlier - and her twelve-year-old daughter who is at the age to be chained as all women of the society are.

This allows a great deal of consideration of the condition of women in the rest of Darkover and, by extension, in our society as well.