STEWART, Mary (Florence Elinor) 1916-

PERSONAL: Born September 17, 1916, in Sunderland, Durham, England; daughter of Frederick Albert (a Church of England clergyman) and Mary Edith (Matthews) Rainbow; married Sir Frederick Henry Stewart, September 24, 1945 (died, 2001). Education: University of Durham, B.A., 1938, M.A., 1941. Hobbies and other interests: Music, painting, the theatre, gardening, crossword puzzles, playing the piano.

ADDRESSES: Office—338 Euston Rd., London NW1 3BH, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, William Morrow & Co., 105 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: University of Durham, Durham, England, lecturer, 1941-45, part-time lecturer, 1948-55; writer, beginning 1954. Military service: Royal Observer Corps, World War II.

MEMBER: PEN, Royal Society of Arts (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: British Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award, 1961, for My Brother Michael; Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, 1964, for This Rough Magic; Frederick Niven Literary

Award, 1971, for The Crystal Cave; Scottish Arts Council Award, 1975, for Ludo and the Star Horse; fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge, 1986.

WRITINGS:

Madam, Will You Talk? (also see below), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1955, Mill (New York, NY), 1956.

Wildfire at Midnight (also see below), Appleton (New York, NY), 1956.

Thunder on the Right, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1957, Mill (New York, NY), 1958.

Nine Coaches Waiting (also see below), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1958, Mill (New York, NY), 1959.

My Brother Michael (also see below), Mill (New York, NY), 1960.

The Ivy Tree (also see below), Hodder & Stoughton, 1961, Mill (New York, NY), 1962.

The Moon-Spinners (also see below), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1962, Mill (New York, NY), 1963.

Three Novels of Suspense (contains Madam, Will You Talk?, Nine Coaches Waiting, and My Brother Michael), Mill (New York, NY), 1963.

This Rough Magic (also see below), Mill (New York, NY), 1964.

Airs above the Ground (also see below), Mill (New York, NY), 1965.

The Gabriel Hounds (also see below), Mill (New York, NY), 1967.

The Wind off the Small Isles, illustrated by Laurence Irving, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1968.

The Spell of Mary Stewart (contains This Rough Magic, The Ivy Tree, and Wildfire at Midnight), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1968.

Mary Stewart Omnibus (contains Madam, Will You Talk?, Wildfire at Midnight, and Nine Coaches Waiting), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1969.

The Crystal Cave (also see below), Morrow (New York, NY), 1970, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1996.

The Little Broomstick (for children), illustrated by Shirley Hughes, Brockhampton Press (Leicester, England), 1971, Morrow (New York, NY), 1972.

The Hollow Hills (also see below), Morrow (New York, NY), 1973, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1996.

Ludo and the Star Horse (juvenile), illustrated by Gino D'Achille, Brockhampton Press (Leicester, England), 1974.

Touch Not the Cat (also see below), Morrow (New York, NY), 1976.

Triple Jeopardy (contains My Brother Michael, The Moon-Spinners, and This Rough Magic), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1978.

Selected Works (contains The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, Wildfire at Midnight, and Airs above the Ground), Heinemann (London, England), 1978.

The Last Enchantment (also see below), Morrow (New York, NY), 1979, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1996.

A Walk in Wolf Wood: A Tale of Fantasy and Magic, illustrated by Emanuel Schongut, Morrow (New York, NY), 1980.

Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy (contains The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment), Morrow (New York, NY), 1980.

The Wicked Day, Morrow (New York, NY), 1983, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1996.

Mary Stewart—Four Complete Novels (contains Touch Not the Cat, The Gabriel Hounds, This RoughMagic, and My Brother Michael), Avenel Books (New York, NY), 1983.

Thornyhold, Morrow (New York, NY), 1988.

Frost on the Window: Poems, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

The Stormy Petrel, Morrow (New York, NY), 1991.

The Prince and the Pilgrim, Morrow (New York, NY), 1995.

Rose Cottage, Morrow (New York, NY), 1997.

Also author of radio plays, Lift from a Stranger, Call Me at Ten-Thirty, The Crime of Mr. Merry, and The Lord of Langdale, produced by British Broadcasting Corporation, 1957-58. Stewart's works have been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew, Icelandic, and Slovak. The National Library of Scotland houses Stewart's manuscript collection.

ADAPTATIONS: The Moon-Spinners was filmed by Walt Disney in 1964. Frost on the Window: Poems was adapted for audiocassette by Dove (Beverly Hills, CA), 1991.

SIDELIGHTS: Mary Stewart's writing career is divided into two distinct parts. In her first period, according to Kay Mussell in the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Stewart "wrote a remarkable series of ten popular novels of romantic suspense…. In her later phase, beginning in the late 1960s, Stewart's novels have been concerned with history and frequently with the occult. Her best-known work from this period was her four-volume series about King Arthur and Merlin." In the words of a National Observer critic, "Like a magician, she conjures exotic moods and mysteries from mere words, her only aim to entertain."

Stewart explained in an article for Writer magazine: "I am first and foremost a teller of tales, but I am also a serious-minded woman who accepts the responsibilities of her job, and that job, if I am to be true to what is in me, is to say with every voice at my command: 'We must love and imitate the beautiful and the good.' It is a comment on our age that one hesitates to stand up and say this aloud."

While "predictability" is not a quality most authors would strive for, a Christian Science Monitor reviewer felt that this trait has been the secret of Stewart's success. Prior to 1970, for example, her plots followed a fairly consistent pattern of romance and suspense set in vividly depicted locales such as Provence, the Isle of Skye, the Pyrenees, Delphi, and Lebanon. Furthermore, noted the Christian Science Monitor reviewer, "Mrs. Stewart doesn't pull any tricks or introduce uncomfortable issues. Attractive, well-brought-up girls pair off with clean, confident young men, always on the side of the angels. And when the villains are finally rounded up, no doubts disturb us—it is clear that the best men have won again." The heroine of these stories is always "a girl displaying just the right combination of strengths and weaknesses. She may blunder into traps and misread most of the signals, but she will—feminine intuition being what it is—stumble onto something important. She will also need rescuing in a cliff-hanging finale." In short, the reviewer concluded, "It all makes excellent escape fiction."

"One of Stewart's finest qualities as a writer," Mussell wrote, "is her extraordinary descriptive prose. Stewart's ability to evoke a highly specific time and place, through sensuous descriptions of locale, character, and food, provides an immediacy that is often lacking in mystery fiction. Her academic background in English literature lends thematic and dramatic elements in the epigrams to her chapters and the literary allusions within the works."

New York Times Book Review critic Anthony Boucher defined Stewart's fiction as belonging to "that special subspecies of mystery one might call the Cinderella-suspense novel." This subspecies, Boucher believed, "is designed by feminine authors for feminine readers; yet a male can relish such highpoints as Jane Eyre or Rebecca. Of current practitioners, I can't think of anyone (aside from du Maurier herself) who tells such stories quite as well as Mary Stewart."

Other critics have noted the same qualities in Stewart's writing. New York Herald Tribune Book Review critic James Sandoe called Madam, Will You Talk? "a distinctly charming, romantic thriller… [that is] intelligently soft-boiled, pittypat and a good deal of fun." My Brother Michael, according to Francis Iles of the Guardian, was "the contemporary thriller at its very best." Speaking of the same novel, a Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that the novel "oozes Southern authenticity like honey over a hot biscuit … her fine writing and the ring of her natural voice will carry readers along like a tale told on a porch on a sultry Southern night." Boucher, too, found the book worthy of praise: "If the delightfully entertaining novels of Mary Stewart … have had a fault, it is that their plots are (in James Sandoe's useful term) Eurydicean—they cannot survive a backward glance. But in My Brother Michael even this flaw vanishes …. This detective adventure, rich in action and suspense, is seen through the eyes of a characteristic Stewart heroine; and surely there are few more attractive young women in today's popular fiction…. These girls areas far removed as you can imagine from the Idiot Heroine who disfigures (at least for men) so much romantic fiction."

In 1970, Stewart turned to historical fiction. The main focus of this new interest was Arthurian England, especially as seen through the eyes of Merlin the magician. Liz Holliday in the St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers believed Stewart's Merlin character "is an intriguing mixture of pragmatist and fey, believer and agnostic. He has visions, true dreams in which he sees what is and what is to come. These, he believes, come from a god: but he refuses to identify this god as being Christian, Mithraditic or of the Druidic, goddess-worshipping Old Faith. At the same time he is portrayed as a polymath, dedicated to understanding the world through scholarship in the fields of science, mathematics and engineering."

Unlike most other authors who have written about the legends of Camelot in terms of the Middle Ages, Stewart placed her story in more historically accurate fifth-century Britain. Reviewing The Crystal Cave, the first of three books on Merlin, a Best Sellers critic wrote: "Fifth-century Britain and Brittany come to life in Miss Stewart's vigorous imagination…. Those who have read and enjoyed the many novels of Mary Stewart will not need to be told this is an expertly fashioned continually absorbing story, with a facile imagination fleshing out the legend of the parentage of the future King Arthur—and, too, of Merlin himself." A Books and Bookmen critic called it "a highly plotted and rattling good yarn. Mary Stewart's evocation of an era of magic, as well as of bloodletting, is magnificently done. Her writing is virile, and of a very high quality indeed. Her descriptions of the countryside are often moving, also poetical."

New York Times Book Review critic Martin Levin, after reminding readers that little is actually known of Merlin's life, noted that "the author obligingly expands [Merlin's] myth into a first-person history…. Cheerfully disclaiming authenticity, Miss Stewart … lightens the Dark Ages with legend, pure invention and a lively sense of history." A Christian Science Monitor reviewer, however, found this type of "history" to be somewhat compromised by the author's emphasis on Merlin's magical powers. "There really is little 'magic' in the story," the reviewer explained, "and what there is rarely exceeds the familiar 'knowing before the event.' But the very uncertainty of its inclusion lends a certain falseness to an otherwise absorbing story, which has been carefully researched historically so that it is peripherally authentic." But the reviewer concluded, "The Crystal Cave evokes an England long gone and could prove an interesting guidebook to some of the less touristy attractions of the Cornish and Welsh countryside."

The Hollow Hills is a continuation of Merlin's story. A Publishers Weekly critic called it "romantic, refreshing and most pleasant reading…. Mrs. Stewart has steeped herself well in the folklore and known history of fifth-century Britain and she makes of her feuding, fighting warlords lively and intriguing subjects." A Best Sellers critic wrote: "All in all, this makes a smashing good tale. The suspense is superb and the reader is kept involved in the unwinding of the plot. Miss Stewart has taken the main lines of the Arthurian legend and has developed the basic elements in a plausible way."

Joseph McLellan of the Washington Post Book World found the third Merlin book, The Last Enchantment, to be somewhat anticlimactic. "Having used two long, exciting novels to get Arthur on the throne," he concluded, "Miss Stewart has reached the final volume of her trilogy and we can settle back expecting to hear the old stories told again with her unique touch. There is only one trouble with this expectation: Mary Stewart does not fulfill it, and she quite clearly never had any intentions of fulfilling it. Her story is not strictly about Arthur but about Merlin…. Strictly speaking, once Arthur is safely on the throne … Merlin's life work is over. He spends most of The Last Enchantment fading away as gracefully as he can manage…. [As a result of this shift in emphasis,] the role of Arthur in this volume is fitful and erratic; he is a powerful presence but not the central character."

Very much aware of the difficulties involved in gathering and making sense out of the confusing source material available on Merlin's life, McLellan praised Stewart for "the ingenuity of [her] effort," though he felt that the story's ultimate plausibility was somewhat in doubt. "She gives us … traditional materials," he noted, "but the treatment is her own, the emphasis shifted for her purpose, which is not simply to recast old material but to bring alive a long-dead historical epoch—not the Middle Ages of Malory but the Dark Ages of the original Arthur. This she does splendidly. Fifth-century Britain is caught in these pages, and while it may lack some of the exotic glitter of the imaginary twelfth-century Britain that Arthur usually inhabits, it is a fascinating place."

Stewart followed her Merlin Trilogy with one last book based on the Arthurian legends, The Wicked Day, a tale told by Arthur's bastard son Mordred. According to Arthurian tradition, Mordred is the cause of Arthur's eventual downfall. He has a "bad reputation as Arthur's mean-spirited, traitorous, regicidal son," as Roy Hoffman explained in the New York Times Book Review.

But in Stewart's version of the story, Mordred is more a tragic figure in the drama than a conscious agent of destruction. "Stewart," Hoffman wrote, "attempts to resurrect him as a compassionate young man who is helpless before fate." Journal of Reading contributor M. Jean Greenlaw found that "Stewart shapes a sense of the inevitable doom of Camelot, not by Mordred's desire but by the fateful actions of many men and women." School Library Journal writer Mary Mills concluded that "Stewart has created flesh and blood characters out of legends, and in doing so has crafted a well-plotted and passionate drama." Holliday believed that "telling the tale from Mordred's point of view works splendidly. It allows his character to emerge as much more complex and sympathetic than it might otherwise have done. Here, Mordred is clearly as much a victim … as Arthur ever was, and his attempts to overcome the weakness of character that leads him to his final clash with his father make him an engaging, if not wholly likeable, character." A School Library Journal reviewer noted that Stewart demonstrated "how average people can be manipulated by their destiny toward … far-reaching consequences."

In an article for Philological Quarterly, Maureen Fries compared Stewart's treatment of Arthurian legend with that of T. H. White, the author of The Once and Future King. "Of all literary genres," Fries began, "romance is perhaps the most irrational, focusing as it does upon the strange, the marvelous, and the supernatural. And of all the 'matters' of romance, that of Britain contains the most irrationalities." But Fries concluded that "in making over medieval romance into modern novels, T. H. White and Mary Stewart have not only coped, mostly successfully, with the irrationality of the Matter of Britain. They have also grasped and translated into a convincing modern, if diverse, idiom that rational core of truth about human psychology, and the human condition, which constitutes not only the greatness of the Arthurian legend but also its enduring appeal to readers of all centuries and all countries, and to writers of every time and every literary persuasion."

In the early 1980s Stewart continued writing medieval tales. A Walk in Wolf Wood concerns two modern-day children who are thrust backwards in time to the Middle Ages. "The eerie events that overtake [the children] become the vehicle for an incisive exploration of magic, savagery and the mis-uses of power," observed Times Literary Supplement contributor Mary Cadogan. "The trappings of another time like jousts and hunts, terraces and towers, are vivid and atmospheric but not overdone."

Explaining her decision to switch from writing thrillers to historical fiction, Mary Stewart once told CA: "I always planned that some day I would write a historical novel, and I intended to use Roman Britain as the setting. This is a period that I have studied over many years. But then, quite by chance, I came across a passage in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which described the first appearance of Merlin, the Arthurian 'enchanter.' Here was a new story, offering a new approach to a dark and difficult period, with nothing known about the 'hero' except scraps of legend. The story would have to come purely from imagination, pitched somewhere between legend and truth and fairy-tale and known history. The setting would be imaginary, too, a Dark Age Britain in the unrecorded aftermath of the Roman withdrawal. I had originally no intention of writing more than one volume, but the story seized my imagination…. It has been a tough job and a rewarding one. I have learned a lot, not least that the powerful themes of the Arthurian 'Matter of Britain' are as cogent and real today as they were fourteen centuries ago. And Merlin's story has allowed me to return to my first avocation of all, that of poet."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 7, 1977, Volume 35, 1985.

Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, Continuum (New York, NY), 2001.

Friedman, Lenemaja, Mary Stewart, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1990.

Newquist, Roy, Counterpoint, Rand McNally (New York, NY), 1964.

St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

periodicals

Arthurian Interpretations, spring, 1987, pp. 70-83.

Best Sellers, October 1, 1967; July 15, 1970; July 15, 1973; November, 1976, p. 250.

Booklist, April 15, 1992, p. 1547; April 1, 1998,p. 1314; June 1, 1998, p. 1723.

Books and Bookmen, August, 1970.

Book Week, November 21, 1965.

Christian Science Monitor, September 28, 1967; September 3, 1970.

Guardian, February 26, 1960.

Harper's, September, 1970.

Journal of Reading, May, 1984, p. 741.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1983, p. 840; July 15, 1991,p. 887.

Library Journal, June 15, 1973; March 1, 2002, review of Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy and The Wicked Day, p. 172.

National Observer, October 23, 1967.

New Statesman, November 5, 1965.

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, May 27, 1956; October 5, 1958; March 8, 1959; March 4, 1962.

New York Times, March 18, 1956; September 9, 1956; May 18, 1958; January 18, 1959.

New York Times Book Review, April 10, 1960; January 7, 1962; October 24, 1965; October 15, 1967; August 9, 1970; July 29, 1973; September 2, 1979; January 1, 1984, p. 20.

Philological Quarterly, spring, 1977, pp. 259-265.

Publishers Weekly, September 16, 1988; July 12, 1991; January 20, 1997.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 1956; May 22, 1960.

School Library Journal, March, 1984, p. 178.

Sunday Times Colour Supplement, June 13, 1976.

Time, January 5, 1968.

Times Educational Supplement, February 5, 1982,p. 28.

Times Literary Supplement, July 18, 1980, p. 806.

Washington Post Book World, March 31, 1968; September 15, 1976; July 22, 1979.

Writer, May, 1970, pp. 9-12, 46.*