An odd early fantasy appearing on Gygax's "Appendix N"

So, "The Blue Star" is one of those odd old fantasy novels that predates the birth of "modern" fantasy after Tolkien, it has some of the odd conventions that tended to appear in such early fantasy (such as the "framing" scenes at the very beginning and ending of the novel in which people from our world speculate about the existence of such a fantasy world, and then muse about it afterward, unconnected to the actual story. I found it a little less enjoyable than most of the Appendix N works I've managed to track down - perhaps because the protagonists are not very likeable. There is also some very disturbing stuff in there (on of the protagonists essentially rapes the other, and it is brushed off as rather unimportant - perhaps a reflection of the more patriarchal times in which the novel was written, but very unsettling to the more enlightened modern reader. There are some really interesting aspects to the magic of this fantasy world, such as witchery being inherited by women only through the female bloodline, but the power to unlock the magic of a Blue Star (a gemstone that gives its wielder the power to read minds, among other things, apparently) can only be used to the benefit of a witch's male lover or husband, for only men can actually wield the Blue Star, it seems. This "gendered" magic is original and creative in the time period during which this was written, and reaches its full flowering and development (with rather different results) with fantasy like Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. Anyway, I enjoyed it, but it just wasn't *great* . . .