Bingeing on Mary Stewart

Mary Stewart was a favorite author of mine in my younger days. And recently I've been delving back into her quite extensive works. I'm beginning with the romantic suspense -- partly in the spirit of wondering how they hold up -- I mean, young women in peril and a hero who always appears at just the right moment . . .

I couldn't resist showing these two covers for the same book. I'm pretty sure the long gown and billowing cloak in the first isn't accurate. Might as well have had her clutching a candelabrum with all the candles aflame. The girl on the second cover is a far better representation of the typical Stewart heroine -- young, attractive, adventurous, intelligent, and very much of her time. (I wonder if these books would appeal to the current crop of young women? Probably not -- far too innocent.)

The books I remember best are from the Fifties and Sixties, though Stewart's books were still coming out in the Nineties. 

Her Arthurian books, a very different and wonderful kettle of fish, came out in the Seventies and I'll get to them when I've had enough of plucky girls in distress.

The thing I'm finding is that, in spite of the sometimes hackneyed  setups, the plots are devious and fascinating, the heroines are charming and independent, taking matters into their own capable hands and not depending on the timely arrival of the hero. Stewart is, indeed, credited with  doing away with the hapless, helpless damsel in distress by making all her heroines intelligent.  

But even if all her heroines were wimps (they're not) and all her plots totally predictable (they're not,) it would still be worth reading Stewart for her absolutely glorious descriptions of places. And what places! Provence, the Isle of Skye, a French chateau, a convent in the French Pyrenees, Greece, Northumberland, Crete, Corfu, Austria, Damascus . . .

I'll be in one of these place for the next little while -- cheering for the plucky girl.

Do any of you remember the Mary Stewart books? If so, did you have a favorite? There are many more I haven't shown -- The Ivy Tree, The Gabriel Hounds, Thornycroft, The Stormy Petrel . . .

Two Books

Our local library has an ongoing book sale that I can't resist -- 50 cents per paperback, $1 per hardcover. Some of the books are donated; some have been purged because no one's checking them out.

My last two reads have come from the book sale -- two very different books.

The Farewell Symphony by noted novelist Edmund White was a NY Times Notable Book of the Year -- "a novel of opulent sensuality and manifold sorrows that is at once the story of a writer's education (sentimental, erotic, and aesthetic) and an elegy for the gay world that flourished between Stonewall and the present.. . a work of Proustian richness, sadness, and wisdom . . . the premier chronicler of his generation." So says the back cover.

It's all of those things -- and more. A very intimate look at a segment of pre-AIDS gay society which I found fascinating -- as an anthropologist might find fascinating the interactions of some previously unknown tribe. I also found it beautifully written and profoundly unsettling.

So it was something of a relief to turn to Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael. I was a great fan of Stewart's romantic suspense back in the Sixties (this book was published in 1959) and I decided it would be interesting to see how it had held up.

At first I thought I wasn't going to enjoy it -- a slightly silly female protagonist becomes involved with a handsome mysterious man -- look at the cover, I thought, there she is in her dress and high heels, fleeing some unknown danger. Plus everybody was always smoking -- which no longer seems sophisticated and adult to me. (On the contrary . . .)

But then I remembered why I loved Stewart's books -- it's the settings and the descriptions. This one is set in Greece -- in and around Delphos.

"Bigger and bigger grew the circling hills, barer the land, drawn in with great sweeps of colour that ran from red to ochre, from ochre to burnt-tawny, with, above all, the burning, the limitless, the lovely light. And beyond all, at length, a grey ghost of a mountain massif; not purple, not faintly blue with distance like the mountains of a softer country, but spectre-white, magnificent, a lion silvered. Parnassus, home of the ghosts of the old gods."

Stewart spins a good yarn, as they say. But it's the descriptions, in the end, that make her stories places I want to revisit.