White Raven

I found this picture on the Goddess Central page on Facebook. White ravens are rare (though apparently there's a flock of them in Alaska, near Juneau). In Welsh, the word for White Raven (or White Crow) is Branwen, which is also a girl's name.
When I was looking for a name for one of my main characters, Branwen was the one I chose, partly for the Celtic raven associations, but also as an homage to Mary Gentle's character White Crow, who appears in several books.
In Rats and Gargoyle, Valentine/White Crow is a practitioner of Hermetic science and magic in a Renaissance city where human sized Rats also live - and I loved that book from the moment the rat with a rapier appeared!
In The Architecture of Desire, along with Lord-Architect Casaubon (who is hopelessly in love with her) White Crow is in a Restoration London where Queen Carola rules and Protector-General Olivia opposes her.
Left To His Own Devices brings White Crow and Casaubon into a modern day London slightly skewed out of this universe. This one has one of my favourite opening lines: "Eighty feet above the London pavement, rapier strikes against dagger."
It's obvious from the writing that Mary Gentle knows exactly what it feels like to handle a sword - and she includes a re-enactment group that portrays Elizabethan Wars of Religion, to give a context for the swordplay in a story which is more about computer hacking.
And in Scholars and Soldiers she takes us back to the city of Rats and Gargoyles in a short story collection.
They're all rich and rewarding reads, full of lush detail and interesting characters (she has a Rat Queen Victoria in one story, a nest of eight telepathically linked giant rats, tied together by the tails!)- and they're books I keep coming back to re-read. Which is not something I do much unless there's really something special about an author.