Along with Jane Gaskell and Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was one of the most influential revisionist and feminist voices in contemporary fantasy writing. Unlike them, she was principally published and known as a voice firmly rooted in the science-fiction, fantasy and horror world. One reason for this was that she was remarkably prolific – only genre publishing could have coped with putting the majority of her 90 novels and 200 short stories into print.

In the course of her long career – she made her first sale, a young adult novel, The Dragon Hoard (1971), at 21 and wrote up to her death – she produced adult and young adult novels, science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, spy fiction, erotica, a historical novel (The Gods Are Thirsty, in 1996, about the French Revolution, one of her many obsessions), radio plays and two episodes of the television space opera Blake’s 7. Yet all her work shares a tone – Lee captured like few other modern writers a gothic, not to say goth, sensibility in which the relentless pursuit of personal autonomy and sensual fulfilment leads her characters to the brink of delirium, as well as to a fierce integrity that can co-habit with self-sacrificing empathy.

Like Carter in particular, Lee writes in a mode heavily influenced by decadents such as Aubrey Beardsley and William Beckford and yet concerned with ethical behaviour as well as personal fulfilment.

It is typical that in the first of her Flat Earth sequence, Night’s Master (1978), the demon lord Azhrarn should accept responsibility when his random acts of sadistic vengefulness cause the potential destruction of humanity, and sacrifice himself; also typical of Lee’s mordant irony that he does so because, without humanity to torment, his life would have no point. Another of the Flat Earth novels, Death’s Master, won the British Fantasy award in 1980 – Lee was the first woman to be so honoured.

Lee was fascinated by genre tropes and the possibilities involved in re-imagining them – The Birthgrave (1975), in a way groundbreaking in its time, combines planetary romance and epic fantasy tropes in a tale of a goddess-like woman re-establishing autonomy and identity. Under the influence of Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), she turned energetically to fairy-story re-imaginings.

In the short story Red as Blood, for example, she turned the Snow White tale on its head so that a virtuous witch queen is trying to save the kingdom from her vampire step-daughter – after all, “skin white as snow, lips red as blood” are something of a giveaway. What is particularly inventive about the story is that its internal logic dictates resolution via a redemptive prince who is a Christ-figure in the manner of Oscar Wilde’s tales.

Born in London, the child of professional dancers, Bernard and Hylda, Lee spent her childhood travelling around the British Isles. Because of dyslexia, she learned to read a little late but thereafter devoured the printed world. Among many other schools, she attended Catford grammar school, south-east London, and then spent a year at Croydon art college; her strong visual sense gave form and discipline to her fiction. Her parents encouraged her to write – most of her early fiction was typed from Tanith’s almost impenetrable handwriting by her mother.

Becoming a writer was a natural extension of her love of story; she was fortunate enough to have written The Birthgrave at a time when, in the US, paperback sf and fantasy was having one of its periodic booms, so that she not only sold that book to DAW Books, but went on selling to them for many years. Further, her editor was impressed enough with her work that he published whatever she wrote – from the epic fantasy of The Birthgrave and its successors to more low-key books about rogues and adventurers to sf set in futures of endless physical self-reinvention (Don’t Bite the Sun, 1976) or erotic fulfilment with automata (The Silver Metal Lover, 1981).

Gradually her work was taken more and more seriously; she won few awards but was nominated for many. Three major collections of her shorter work, Dreams of Dark and Light (1986), Women as Demons (1989) and The Forests of the Night (1989, appeared in the late 1980s.

Thereafter her career went through the doldrums, exacerbated by changes in publishing in the 90s and thereafter. Precisely those qualities that had built her career – her endless fertility and constant self-reinvention – were liabilities in a publishing world obsessed with strict category and with authors who produce the same reliable product. At one point, she complained that she was writing books because she could do no other, but was stacking them unpublished in a cupboard.

Luckily, the rise of the small press movement, coupled with sales through the internet, made it possible for her career to revive and the last years of her life saw her experimenting with work that completely transcended strict genre boundaries. She explored her current themes in a series – the Colour sequence of 2011 onwards – that could follow what was broadly speaking a horror novel with another that was a spy novel. An extended squabble with some of her other publishers over rights was resolved and DAW started a significant reissue of 22 of her books.

Illness hindered her writing in her last months. At the time of her death, her editors were working on a short story collection that will appear posthumously – a last Flat Earth novel remains unfinished.

Her husband, the painter and writer John Kaiine, whom she married in 1992, survives her.

• Tanith Lee, writer, born 19 September 1947; died 24 May 2015