a poem i wrote back in my early college days...based on an illustration of the night which was in a German children's book of mine.

Lady Death

I dreamt I stared Death in the face
but oh! What a surprise!
She was a dark-haired maiden
with the loveliest of eyes.
Her hand outstretched...she beckoned me.
Her face was carved of ivory.
Her lips were red without compare.
Her countenance was grave but fair.
Her cloak was of an ash-grey hue.
I stared and knew not what to do.
With softest voice, in lilting song,
she asked for me to come along.
She slowly took me by the hand
and led me into Shadowland.
I turned, looked back at life and yet
I followed her without regret.

i never did but now i wish i had, thats nice.

Well, Peter Beagle did, in a short story, "Come, Lady Death," that Neil says may have influenced him. Does that count?

Nope, can't say I did. I was prepared for a sypathetic treatment of the anthropomorphic personification of the purchase of agricultural real estate (always wanted to say that! ), since I'd been reading Discworld for several years, and so I was used to the idea of a Death who is kindly disposed towards humanity in general, although, unsurprisingly, Neil and Pratchett use their respective Deaths to explore different issues.

In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge gives Death a female companion who is more Death than he is.

quote:

Her lips are red, her looks are free,
Her locks are yellow as gold:
Her skin is white as leprosy,
And she is far liker Death than he;
Her flesh makes the still air cold.

In the play 'La Dama Del Alba' by Casona, Death appears as a woman, and in 'Blood Wedding' by Lorca Death wanders on stage dressed as a Begger Woman.

So though the anthropomorphic Male Death is more popular, the Female personification has popped up before.

well...i hope it didn't seem as if i were implying that i was the only person other than Neil to view Death as a woman...and thank you for the examples. i've read "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" but i didn't remember that detail. it was never my favorite poem by Coleridge...i liked "Kubla Khan" so much better. and i wasn't aware of the others.

The word 'death' is feminine in Spanish and other (if not all) Romance languages. There are plenty of occurrences in Spanish literature, especially of the Romantic period, in which Death is female, sometimes a young and beautiful woman with whom the poet/writer is in love, sometimes a cold and cruel lady, sometimes old and crone-like... The figures of Death and the Fates are often combined together as well.
In fact, I was surprised to read in Discworld about Death being a MAN (translation anecdote: the first translations of Discworld I read had tansformed Death into a woman, but when they published The Lost Continent the translator was changed and he chose to leave him as a man, which was confusing).