Reading Mary Stewart
Feb. 3rd, 2022 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemadamI have fifteen books by Mary Stewart on my shelves and I thought I’d read them all. The other day, looking for something to read, I found this wasn’t the case and quite a feast of reading was available. I didn’t realise I would be so hooked as to get through a book a day.
Mary Stewart’s first published novel was Madam, Will You Talk? (1955), which I remember as quite scary. I began my new reading with Rose Cottage. This is one of her late books (1997) and although a pleasant read, lacks the thrills of the earlier novels. Almost all Mary Stewart’s books involve a lone woman travelling abroad, finding mystery and danger she wasn’t expecting. In My Brother Michael (1960), Camilla, a classics teacher, writes from Greece to a friend that ‘nothing ever happens to me’. Little does she know. In no time she’s caught up in a mystery which goes back to the second world war and involves past murders, a great discovery and more murders and dangers. Luckily, the hero, Simon (Michael’s brother), is well able to look after her. This book is steeped in classical history, which I assume to be accurate. There is a wonderful feeling of place and of the past being bound up with the present, even if that past was 2,000 years ago.
I moved on to Nine Coaches Waiting (1958), which I could hardly bear to put down. Linda goes to France as governess to Philippe, nine-years-old but already Comte de Valmy, a vast estate which he will come into when he is fifteen. One of his uncles runs the estate and is obsessed with it; only one fragile life stands between him and what he considers his right. But could this handsome, charming cripple in a wheelchair really be the wicked uncle of fiction? Linda becomes very fond of quiet little Philippe and before long is sure there is a plot to kill him. The problem is knowing which of the relatives and servants to trust. The story is fast moving and becomes nerve-wracking as it races towards the finale. I think that having a child’s life at stake increases the tension. Mary Stewart was very good at picking quotations for chapter headings and they are particularly apt here.
I’m now reading Wildfire at Midnight, set on Skye in Coronation year and published only three years later. Divorced Gianetta, named for a famous (or notorious) relative, is a mannequin, as models were called in those days. Tired of London and the Coronation crowds everywhere, she decides to take a holiday and her mother suggests Skye. On the boat over, a fellow traveller points out the individual Cuillins to her. Before she’s even landed, she senses that Mr Grant and the skipper are avoiding a certain subject and that there’s something they don’t want her to know. I look forward to finding out what it is. Reading about the Cuillins brought back a song we sang at junior school, which had the refrain,
‘It’s the far Cuillins are puttin’ love on me
As step I with my cromach to the Isles.’
Strange, the things one remembers.
Mary Stewart’s first published novel was Madam, Will You Talk? (1955), which I remember as quite scary. I began my new reading with Rose Cottage. This is one of her late books (1997) and although a pleasant read, lacks the thrills of the earlier novels. Almost all Mary Stewart’s books involve a lone woman travelling abroad, finding mystery and danger she wasn’t expecting. In My Brother Michael (1960), Camilla, a classics teacher, writes from Greece to a friend that ‘nothing ever happens to me’. Little does she know. In no time she’s caught up in a mystery which goes back to the second world war and involves past murders, a great discovery and more murders and dangers. Luckily, the hero, Simon (Michael’s brother), is well able to look after her. This book is steeped in classical history, which I assume to be accurate. There is a wonderful feeling of place and of the past being bound up with the present, even if that past was 2,000 years ago.
I moved on to Nine Coaches Waiting (1958), which I could hardly bear to put down. Linda goes to France as governess to Philippe, nine-years-old but already Comte de Valmy, a vast estate which he will come into when he is fifteen. One of his uncles runs the estate and is obsessed with it; only one fragile life stands between him and what he considers his right. But could this handsome, charming cripple in a wheelchair really be the wicked uncle of fiction? Linda becomes very fond of quiet little Philippe and before long is sure there is a plot to kill him. The problem is knowing which of the relatives and servants to trust. The story is fast moving and becomes nerve-wracking as it races towards the finale. I think that having a child’s life at stake increases the tension. Mary Stewart was very good at picking quotations for chapter headings and they are particularly apt here.
I’m now reading Wildfire at Midnight, set on Skye in Coronation year and published only three years later. Divorced Gianetta, named for a famous (or notorious) relative, is a mannequin, as models were called in those days. Tired of London and the Coronation crowds everywhere, she decides to take a holiday and her mother suggests Skye. On the boat over, a fellow traveller points out the individual Cuillins to her. Before she’s even landed, she senses that Mr Grant and the skipper are avoiding a certain subject and that there’s something they don’t want her to know. I look forward to finding out what it is. Reading about the Cuillins brought back a song we sang at junior school, which had the refrain,
‘It’s the far Cuillins are puttin’ love on me
As step I with my cromach to the Isles.’
Strange, the things one remembers.
