Leaves & Pages

Lady Mary Florence Elinor Stewart

September 17, 1916 – May 9, 2014

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Mary Stewart Obituaries – May 15, 2014

The Guardian and The Telegraph

This saddens me greatly, even though the announcement of the death of a woman of 97 is not to be unexpected.

Mary Stewart was a writer of great sensitivity to detail and abundant good humour; in the few short years I have been “tuned in” to her I have received immense pleasure from her books, and I am most definitely not alone.

Two of her books currently sit here on my desk waiting for their reviews, which will, when written, be enthusiastically favourable. They are Madam Will You Talk? and Nine Coaches Waiting, Mary Stewart’s first and fourth “romantic thrillers”, and alongside My Brother Michael and The Ivy Tree, well and away my stand-out favourites of the thirteen of her twenty-four books I have so far read. She is one of those writers whose work I now approach with great anticipation, opening each new-to-me book with a mind completely open to the adventure about to unfold. Comfort reading, to be sure – utterly perfect for taking one out of the troubles and travails of one’s here-and-now and into another place and time – and no bad thing.

Occasionally Mary Stewart causes me to raise a cynical eyebrow at her heroines’ unlikely escapes from certain death – what I personally term the “scrambling-across-precipitous-chateau-roofs-while-dodging-a-professional-assassin’s-bullets-and-not-losing-one’s-high-heels-or-irretrievably-ruining-one’s-favourite-leaf-green-linen-sheath-dress” school of literature – but I always forgive these, because I’ve become (mostly) reconciled to “the formula” – such as it is! –  and the majority of her writing is extremely intelligent, not to mention often poignant (consider all those tragically bereaved protagonists), usually humorous, and, occasionally, rather darkly sophisticated.

In her own words:

“Perhaps the commonest question of all is: ‘I suppose you have to have had all the experiences you describe?’ Considering the kind of thing that commonly befalls the heroines of my books, this always startles me a little. What sort of life do people imagine that I lead? The answer to that, of course, is that the word “imagine” means nothing to them, and to them one can hardly start explaining how imagination allows a writer to describe vividly something he has never done or seen. I personally have never been threatened with a gun while driving a racing Mercedes at ninety miles an hour. I have never been hunted with a fish-spear off the coast of Crete. I have never even been alone with a homicidal maniac on a Scottish mountainside. But I think I know how it would feel if I were. The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.”

Literary Guild Review, August 1964

and

“[I] take conventionally bizarre situations (the car chase, the closed-room murder, the wicked uncle tale) and send real people into them, normal everyday people with normal everyday reactions to violence and fear; people not ‘heroic’ in the conventional sense, but averagely intelligent men and women who could be shocked or outraged into defending, if necessary with great physical bravery, what they held to be right.”

“The story comes first and is served first…These novels are light, fast-moving stories which are meant to give pleasure, and where the bees in the writer’s bonnet are kept buzzing very softly indeed. 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.'”

“Teller of Tales,” in The Writer, Vol. 83, No. 5, May 1970

I am deeply indebted to those of my online book friends who encouraged me to more deeply investigate Mary Stewart these past few years, calling me out when I dismissively referred to her as “just one of those romance writers.” Their united enthusiasm made me take a closer look, and for that I am most humbly grateful.

Thank you, Mary Stewart, for the pleasure of your story-telling, and for the care and craftsmanship you invested in your work.

Rest in peace.