I admit it: I have been seduced by Patricia A McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the 1975 winner of the inaugural World Fantasy awards and the latest in my trawl through fantasy champions of days gone by. Gorgeous, lyrical prose, a story that is more than just a linear journey from one drama to another, and a three-dimensional female character: it feels a million miles away from my manful slogs through Michael Moorcock's Corum trilogy, and Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga.

Sybel, McKillip's ivory-haired heroine, "beautiful as moonlit ice", lives alone on a mountain with a collection of magical, mythical beasts: the Boar Cyrin, the Dragon Gyld, the Black Swan of Terleth, the tawny Lyon Gules, the Cat Moriah and the falcon Ter. She "called" them and keeps them with her thanks to her power to know their true names (a magic I especially like, ever since Ged first named his shadow in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books) and her heart's desire is to call the "pennant-winged, moon-coloured" bird Liralen. Icy and emotionless, her world is disrupted when Coren, prince of Sirle, seventh son of a seventh son, comes with a newborn baby to her gates. Sybel doesn't want to take Tamlorn, but there is nowhere else safe for the heir to the kingdom, so she raises him on her mountainside, and starts to love him.

Her love draws her into the world of men and a country at war: Tam's father, King Drede, and Coren both want him for what he can bring them, and Sybel too for her power and her beauty. She is determined not to help either side, but once she's started to feel emotion, she can't stop.

There's a truly horrifying scene when Drede's sorcerer "calls" Sybel to him, and threatens to take away her memories and her free will to make her his. Coren wins her because he's truly in love with her, but Sybel has now taken the step into the world of human emotions, and is full of rage and hatred for Drede, plotting his annihilation with her herd of beasts. McKillip has fun piling the negatives onto Sybel in the second half of the book: can we still like a heroine who will wipe a memory from her husband's mind, knowing how much the idea of this troubled her when she was poised to receive the same treatment? And what of her beasts: much as they love her, do they really want to bend to her every whim? ("Free to fly to the world's edge on the rim of twilight ... Free to be stroked by fat-fingered kings in the Southern Deserts, to hear the whisperings of moon-eyed witches," they dream: probably not.)

If I've made it sound generic, it isn't. Eschewing the "farm boy discovers he's heir to the kingdom" trope – Tam is very much a secondary character to Sybel – The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is an elegant look at ideas of memory and captivity: even the ending feels ambiguous, a little empty, as our great sorceress Sybel leaves her fortress of solitude to mother "a houseful of wizardlings". It's not quite a happy ever after for the most powerful woman in the land, and I don't think McKillip intended it to be.

Sprinkled throughout with half-forgotten myths and legends – "the giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there" – The Forgotten Beasts of Eld feels timeless. But it doesn't take itself too seriously, either: "I told you to drop him off the top of Eld Mountain," says Sybel privately to her Falcon, on first meeting Coren. The Liralen, she says later, is "very hard to find, especially when people interrupt me with babies".

I think I've fallen for this book because it's so different to what I was expecting: a cool drink of water in the midst of the overwrought, derivative, under-edited and overwritten tomes that dominate much of fantasy today – and, judging from my excursions into Corum and Kraki, did in the past as well. And others agree: "it feels ageless, eternal, light and perfect like a star", they say here; "one of the great single-volume fantasies", says this site; another reviewer praises McKillip's "evocative, lapidary style". I'd love to know what you think if you've read it too.

I am now girding myself for ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros: DafydA warned that "High Fantasy Overwriting in spades [it] doth have". Bring it on, I say: I am sufficiently refreshed by McKillip to tackle the worst he may have to offer.