Mary Stewart: Writer of romantic novels
1916-2014
MARY Stewart, who has died at the age of 97, was the author of superior romantic thrillers and historical novels.
Her brand of quality escapism was firmly of the old school, but one that concealed a writer of considerable skill. An ability to transport readers to places promising adventure was rewarded with popularity and consistently high sales.
Her work was informed by the traditional requirements of a romantic read, featuring heroines blessed with girlish enthusiasm and resolute, outdoorsy common sense — qualities that reflected her own personality. But her intuitive feel for the past and its recreation in vivid, poetic detail lifted the best of her writing into the class of Dorothy Dunnett, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and John Buchan.
She felt the influence of Renault so strongly that she confessed to keeping away from her books while working on her own.
Her finest and most original achievement was an Arthurian trilogy: The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973) and The Last Enchantment (1979).
Unusually for a romantic novelist, she was not afraid of male heroes and in the trilogy she retold the legend through the eyes of a Welsh Merlin, more prophet and engineer than magician.
Nor was she afraid of critics, a few of whom scorned her use of the discredited historian Geof- frey of Monmouth as a source.
Despite her extensive research, she never claimed her books as works of serious scholarship. Instead, she wrote that she was content to take her place among those historians Gibbon damned as embellishers of fragments and fables.
The daughter of a vicar in County Durham in the UK, she was born Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow on September 17 1916.
Her father’s meagre resources would not allow her to take up either of the places she
Vivid, poetic detail lifted the best of her writing
won at Oxford and Cambridge, so she went instead to university in Durham. There she took a first in English literature in 1938 and was also president of the Women’s Union. She then taught at the university from 1941 until 1956.
In 1945, she married Frederick (later Sir Frederick) Stewart, who would become Regius professor of geology at Edinburgh University.
She was prompted to begin writing novels in the mid-1950s by an ectopic pregnancy and consequent operation that meant she could not have children. A private person, she consoled herself with her writing and a succession of cats.
Her husband, who was knighted in 1974, died in 2001. — © The Daily Telegraph, London