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Mary Stewart, the novelist, is not a common name to hear pass the lips of readers these days. Although an author with a vast legacy who has written 24 books, Stewart wrote mostly romance, a genre often derided outside of its audience, and retired from writing right before the turn of the millennium. As new authors take the spotlight, and we decide which classical authors are canonized, there’s a risk that we may forget everyone in between. But a story is always worth remembering, and Mary Stewart's stories are worth reading again and again. Before her work is forgotten under another layer of discarded paperbacks and shiny marketing for the next hit, lets take her 108th birthday to return to her novels and remind older readers why she was such a hit, and introduce younger readers to an author that may have slipped through the cracks for them.
History
Lady Mary Stewart was born Mary Rainbow on September 17, 1916, in Sunderland, Country Durham, England UK. Her father, Frederick Rainbow, had sailed to New Zealand as a young man where he met Mary Edith Matthews, an elementary school teacher. They soon married, and after returning to England, Frederick became an Anglican clergyman. Mary was their first child, followed by a son and another daughter.
Stewart played with her siblings in the attic, and by seven, she was writing stories about her toys. At eight, she was sent off to boarding school and was bullied mercilessly for being cleaver. The bullying left profound emotional scars on Stewart, and she was quite unhappy at the school. Recognizing Stewart’s situation, her mother moved her to another school. But even in her later years, Stewart admitted the impact of this experience, saying “It does stay with you all your life. I still have no confidence. If someone’s unkind, even faintly unkind, you shrivel.”
Stewart had contemplated becoming a painter but was pushed by her mother to pursue a vocation with a more stable income. She chose to study English at Durham University and received a First Class Honours B.A. in English in 1938, along with a teaching certificate in 1939. She intended to become an Oxford professor, but World War 2 made this difficult, and she eventually settled into a job as an elementary school teacher until 1945, during which she earned a M.A. in English. That same year she met her husband, Henry Stewart, at a Victory in Europe Day celebration at the university. They were married three months later. Henry became one of Britain’s foremost scientists, and in 1974 he was knighted. This, incidentally, made Stewart “Lady Mary Stewart”. They remained together until Henry’s death in 2001. Stewart would never remarry, and the two had no children.
By this point Stewart was working part time as a teacher and writing stories on the side. It was in 1953 that Henry urged Stewart to send the manuscript for Madam, Will You Talk? to Hodder and Stoughton. The publisher loved the novel, but when they sent back an edited manuscript, Stewart rejected them because “My writing is better than your edits – please don’t edit my books if you want to publish them.” The publisher accepted this, and Madam, Will you Talk? was an instant success. Stewart would publish a book nearly every year from 1955 until 1980, and each would be a best seller.
Stewart and her husband traveled often, and these trips provided inspiration for her stories. “Her research was tremendous – no matter where she set her books, she travelled there, so all her descriptions were from life, from Provence to Greece.” Although she became famous to many as the mother of the modern romantic suspense novel, being one of the first to blend romance with mystery and doing it seamlessly, it is her surprising swerve into writing the story of Merlin of the Arthurian Legend that created the classics she’s most known for today.
Stewart had always had a fascination with history, and specifically Roman History, a topic that comes up often in her modern thrillers. This fascination led her to take another look at Merlin, a character who up to that point was virtually untouched by other authors, save T.H. White in The Once and Future King, but which portrayed him as a very stereotypical medieval enchanter. Likewise, while traditional folklore gave an outline of Merlin’s life, there wasn’t much else to go on. The Crystal Cave, the first of her Arthurian Novels, is largely pure invention on her part, with very little taken from tradition, and tells the early days of Merlin up to Arthur’s conception. Interestingly, Stewart originally had no plans to continue the story, as she felt White had already told Arthur’s story better than she could. This would be her attitude for each book in the saga, as she only wrote them because she wanted to, with no regard for markets or what the publishers wanted from her.
Her last novel, Rose Cottage, was published in 1997, and was a bit of an outlier. Lacking the intrigue and plots of her prior stories, it was a softer book, and the one she chose to go out on rather than letting ghost writers aid in writing more stories. She didn’t publish anything else during the final decades of her life, but an unpublished children’s story from 1953 surfaced after her death and was picked up by a publisher in 2014. The last Mary Stewart manuscript, a sequel to Touch Not the Cat, was never published, and never will be. Perhaps in response to the practice of digging up deceased author’s old, unfinished manuscripts and getting someone else to finish them so the publishing companies can have one more book, Stewart shredded this manuscript, declaring, “I don’t want anyone else to find it.” Just as she rejected edits to her manuscript, she refused to give us anything but what she wanted, and decided we couldn’t have her ghost.
Romantic Suspense: The Cleaver Attractive Heroine
As mentioned above, many consider Stewart to be the mother of the modern romantic suspense novel. She was among the first to combine the suspense of the mystery with romance, and her flawless combination elevated her characters. Though not often brought up in the wider conversation, Stewart’s stories were revolutionary in the romance scene, and many authors today cite her as being immensely influential on their work. Her female protagonists are not damsels who take the first opportunity to put themselves in danger, but neither are they merely full of personality, or men in all but name. Instead, they are competent and educated women through and through. They have a wide array of knowledge that informs their view of the world, which can usually be shown in the first sentence. Her novel The Ivy Tree opens with “I might have been alone in a painted landscape.” More than anything, it tells us our protagonist is an introspective woman. She’s all alone, looking at the landscape. It’s not a painting though, it merely “might” be painted. Further, we know she has enough wealth and education to be aware of this and make this comparison. She’s taken a step back from everything to examine the whole scene in front of her where others may only see part. This introspective, passive, but cleaver character trait informs the rest of the novel, in which she lies at the beginning of the novel, then uses a case of mistaken identity to allow everyone around her to make their own assumptions about who she is rather than correcting them. This mistaken identity, and the question of when it will be revealed, is made all the more suspenseful when an old flame of her assumed identity appears and threatens to out her. Here, Stewart masterfully combines the mystery suspense of the plot to defraud the family’s grandfather of his farm, with the romantic suspense of the protagonist’s encounter with a rival farmer who seems to know her. It becomes doubly important that our protagonist correctly juggles her identity, and which lies she’s telling which people, to keep the whole house of cards from crashing down around her, and Stewart does it beautifully. This is the trademark of Stewart’s novels, combining romance and mystery to multiply the suspense and add depth and nuance to the story and female protagonists.
The Merlin Trilogy: A Sharp Swerve onto Arthurian Street
The Merlin Trilogy tells the story of Merlin’s life before and during the Arthurian legend. It seems like an odd direction until you realize it is based on Stewart’s own love of history, and her refusal to be constrained by genre lines. The series consists of three books. The Crystal Caves, which begin when Merlin is 6 and goes up to Arthur’s conception, The Hollow Hills, which covers Merlin’s life from Arthur’s birth up through his coronation, and The Last Enchantment, which is Merlin’s perspective on Arthur’s kingship. Much like her romantic suspense, Stewart combines genres to tell a fantasy grounded in history. When Merlin was born the Romans had only just left Britain. And fantasy elements, such as Merlin’s magic, are used to explain historical oddities like Stonehenge. Fantasy grounded in history was a massive departure from her usual romantic suspense but proved to be just as popular. It cemented Stewart as a storyteller, rather than a romance author. She didn’t write romance because that was all she could do, but because she enjoyed it, and when the whim took her, she didn’t allow anyone's preconceived notions of what she was to constrain the stories she told.
The Wind Off the Small Isles: The Bridge Between
An unassuming book in the middle of Stewart’s portfolio, The Wind off the Small Isles has been described by Stewart as both “a kind of coda” for her romantic novels, and a “bridge to her historical writing. Here, Stewart combines romance and mystery, with history, adding another layer to her usual genre blend. Told over two timelines the story is about a house occupied in the past, and the haunting memory of what happened in it, and in the present by two lovers who must deal with the consequences. Many of her stories feature history in some way, usually references to Roman archeology sites, but here the history of the house is stamped across the story. It is impossible to avoid. In adding history to her usual blend, The Wind off the Small Isles both gives us a proper expansion of her usual style, and links her Merlin Trilogy back to the rest of her work.
Writing Advice: Your Readers Don't Need to Know Everything
It’s so easy to write too much. It’s the flip side of writing too little. You’re worried your reader won’t understand the picture you’re painting, or get the joke unless you spell it out, or see how clever you were. And it’s so easy to spend a page describing a room you won’t be in again, or telling the reader what they see instead of letting them picture it. Worse still, in your quest to make your reader see your literary tricks, you must undermine them.
Mary Stewart understands this dilemma and walks the tightrope masterfully. Not only does she provide beautiful descriptions that last just long enough, but she knows how to use information, or a lack of it, to tell a story. The Ivy Tree, for instance, is built on the assumption that Mary Grey must be an incredible actress to be able to charm so many people she’s never met before and convince them she is Annabel Winslow. But she’s a little too good at it. And as the story goes on the reader is forced to question if Mary Grey is actually Annabel, because we only know a sliver of her life before the story, and surely she can’t be that good of an actress. By deliberately withholding any information about Mary Grey except for a few scraps of information, the reader becomes the subject of dramatic irony, unsure of who Mary Grey actually is, and able to interpret the story in multiple ways to suit their own view of her. By withholding information from the reader, Stewart creates a masterful mystery that sucks you in and forces you to turn the page.
Mary Stewart in Memory
Although you won’t often hear her name in conversation, Mary Stewart was a trailblazer of fiction. She launched romantic suspense into popularity, tackled Mythological Arthurian legends without concern to create one of the definitive tales of Merlin, and crafted a new type of heroine that eschewed the helplessness of the past without sacrificing femininity for competence. Perhaps it is inevitable that as thousands of new books are published each year and talented new authors step into the spotlight, she will fade from our literary memory. But if you can take the time to look beyond the next bestseller, and examine our literature foundation, you’ll find Mary Stewart peeking through the cracks and slipping you some of the most engaging stories you’ve ever read.
Discussion Questions:
1. Today we think of stories as everlasting, either always in print, or in a library somewhere. We’re obsessed with preserving everything we can, and writing a story is almost a kind of immortality. But history is rife with forgotten stories. As the decades pass, her fans grow older, and Mary Stewart fades from memory, what will happen to her stories in an age obsessed with recording everything?
2. Mary Stewart is a very successful author and in her 40 year writing career her stories have sold over 5 million copies. But with contemporary smash hits like Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, which sold over 400,000 copies in 4 months and which itself popularized romantic fantasy as a genre, her success is comparatively small and drowned out. Do you think Rebecca Yarros, and other successful authors today, will one day be forgotten if they can’t secure the title of ‘classic’?
3. Writing the Arthurian Saga was a brave thing to do for Mary Stewart. Her publishers didn’t want her to do it. At the time she had only written romantic suspense, and there was no guarantee that her audience would actually read The Crystal Cave. And even after she did it, and it became a best seller, her publishers still didn’t want her to write a sequel because it was out of her usual style. If your publisher said they didn’t think it was a good idea to publish a book because of branding reasons, would you acquiesce to them, or push for it anyway?
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