I only spent one convention weekend getting to know her, and then met her, briefly, again at another convention, Gollum. So I don't know if I have anything more to add to what I've said before, but I'm happy to repeat that.
She was very old and apparently quite feeble when I met her, and yet she travelled alone to conventions all over the US. Her skin was a faintly bluish grey because of a medical treatment she had as a child or a young woman that left it permanently discolored. The first time I saw her (not the time I met her) was at Mythcon, and I didn't know who she was. I thought the color was face paint and part of the costume she was wearing. I remember that after I had dinner with her at the convention in Oregon, a friend came up and said something along the lines of, "Er, uh, just what nationality is Evangeline?" Undoubtedly people stared and wondered about her wherever she went, but neither that, nor age, nor ill-health stopped her. She went where she wanted to go.
Over dinner she kept mentioning her cat, which we eventually gathered was a stuffed toy. It seemed to have a lot of personality, nevertheless.
Her conversation tended to be rambling, and it took a long time for her to get to the point, but when she got there it turned out to be a good one and entirely relevant to the subject at hand. I was on a panel with her at that convention, with a lot of young female fantasy writers just breaking in (I was fairly new, too, although not one of the young ones). I have always believed that her retellings of the Mabinogion (published by Ballantine at the beginning of the fantasy boom) had almost as much influence over the fantasy genre as it developed in the US as Tolkien's work did, but it was a quieter influence, and I don't think that everyone who felt that influence at second or third hand recognized where it came from. She certainly provided the inspiration for the Celtic fantasy that was so popular for a long time, and I think, if nothing else, she paved the way for a lot of female fantasy writers that followed her. But the young women on that panel -- some of whom seemed quite full of themselves -- only saw an eccentric old lady who rambled on and on, and they showed their impatience quite visibly while waiting for her to come around to whatever insight she would eventually offer -- so impatient, I don't think that they were paying attention by the time she got there. They talked over her; they condescended to her. Knowing who she was, and the influence her books had on me, I was thrilled to be on a panel with her, although that was largely spoiled by my annoyance with the other women. I was the only one on the panel listening to her and asking her questions, but I am sure that some of the people in the audience must have known who she was, and some of them might have come to the panel just to see her. They were probably as annoyed as I was.
But her vision wasn't good, and she needed help finding her way around the hotel and locating elevators, so my friend and I stepped in, and that was how I came to spend most of that day with the woman I consider the great ancestral mother of female fantasy novelists. I wonder if the other women on that panel ever realized their mistake.
I think it was later, when I saw her in Arizona, that she told me the story about drowning a lot of her characters when she was younger because she was so soft-hearted and she believed it was a fairly comfortable way to die. Being similarly soft-hearted (although I exploded characters rather than drowning them), I liked that story.
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