By the end of the 1960s, Mary Stewart had settled into a rhythm that suited her publishers. Every year or two she delivered a romantic suspense novel, sending an ordinary person to the Greek islands or to Damascus and dropping them into a car chase or a locked room. Disney had filmed one of them. When she began a novel about the wizard Merlin, her publishers did not want her to write it, she said years later, because her thrillers were selling too well to risk.
The book was The Crystal Cave, published in 1970. It opened a five-novel Arthurian series, won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has rarely been out of print since. Stewart died in 2014 at 97. This month Centipede Press began selling a collector’s edition of the novel, priced at $165, from October 11. The story starts in Sunderland in 1916, with a vicar’s daughter named Mary Rainbow.
A Scholarship Girl From Sunderland
Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow was born on September 17, 1916, the daughter of a vicar, Frederick Albert Rainbow, and a New Zealand-born primary school teacher, Mary Edith Matthews. At eight she was sent to boarding school in Penrith, where she was bullied, and she later said the experience left a lasting mark. At ten she won a scholarship to Skellfield School in Ripon and excelled at sport.
Oxford, Cambridge and Durham all offered her a place. She took Durham, which came with the largest bursary and the least travel. She graduated with first-class honours in English in 1938. A first-class teaching diploma in English and art followed in 1939 and a master’s degree in 1941. During the war she taught in primary and secondary schools and part-time at Durham School, and at the university she worked as an assistant lecturer from 1941 to 1945. After the war she returned as a part-time lecturer, mostly in Anglo-Saxon literature, from 1948 to 1956.
At a VE Day dance she met Frederick Stewart, a young Scottish geology lecturer. Their engagement was announced a month later, and her father married them in September 1945. An ectopic pregnancy in her thirties left her unable to have children, and she began writing novels.
Thrillers by the Year
Stewart said she had been writing stories since she was three, and in 1955 the habit paid off. Her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, went to Hodder & Stoughton and sold at once. The next year she and her husband moved to Edinburgh, where he became professor of geology and mineralogy. He was knighted in 1974, which made her Lady Stewart, a title she never used.
The books kept coming every year or two. Nine Coaches Waiting appeared in 1958 and My Brother Michael in 1959. The Moon-Spinners followed in 1962, This Rough Magic in 1964 and Airs Above the Ground in 1965. The settings ranged from the Greek islands and Damascus to rural England, Spain and Austria. Stewart liked to drop ordinary people into stock thriller situations such as the car chase and the locked room, and she wanted their fear and outrage to push them into physical courage without turning them into conventional heroes.
This Rough Magic and Airs Above the Ground earned Edgar Award nominations, and My Brother Michael was a Gold Dagger nominee. Disney adapted The Moon-Spinners in 1964, with Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach starring. The Agatha Awards later gave her a lifetime achievement honor. By the end of the decade there was no obvious reason for her to change anything.
Merlin, Against Advice
The pull came from outside the thriller shelf. By the late 1960s readers had rediscovered T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Arthurian stories sold again. Stewart had always wanted to write a historical novel. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain gave her a place to start, and she chose Roman Britain for the setting. She kept away from Mary Renault’s novels while she worked, because Renault’s influence on her was so strong.
The book was largely her own invention, she told Raymond H. Thompson in a 1989 interview, with little taken from tradition. Her publishers had not wanted her to write it, she said, because her earlier books were selling so well. She added that she would never have written it if she had thought about markets, and that she had no plan for a series.
Merlin tells the story himself. He is the illegitimate son of a Welsh princess, growing up at the court of Maridunum under an uncle, Camlach, who has reason to want him gone. An old scholar named Galapas teaches him natural lore and leaves him the crystal cave of the title. Merlin prophesies before the High King Vortigern, escapes to Ambrosius and serves him, and then serves Uther Pendragon. The book ends on the night Arthur is conceived, so Arthur himself has not yet been born.
Stewart made Merlin the narrator instead of Arthur and set the story in the fifth century instead of the twelfth. Her Merlin is a prophet and an engineer more than a wizard. Some critics scorned her use of Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source, and she never claimed scholarship for the books. She said she was content to sit among the historians Gibbon called embellishers of fragments and fables. Kirkus Reviews took a harder line in July 1970: “Period play, ripe and windy, for ladies easily lulled.”
The publishers who doubted the project watched it sell, and it brought her an entirely new readership.
Each Volume the Last
Stewart wrote the sequels one at a time, and she said she wrote each volume believing it would be the last. The Hollow Hills arrived in 1973 and The Last Enchantment in 1979, completing what HarperCollins later issued as the omnibus The Merlin Trilogy in 2004. The Wicked Day followed in 1983 and turned to Mordred, whom she wrote as a tragic figure instead of a plain villain. The Prince and the Pilgrim in 1995 closed the saga at five novels.
The Crystal Cave won the Frederick Niven Literary Award, and it and The Hollow Hills each won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 1991 the first novel reached television as Merlin of the Crystal Cave, directed by Michael Darlow, with Robert Powell and Jon Finch in the cast.
The Last Novels and the Last Years
Between and after the Arthurian books she wrote for younger readers. The Little Broomstick appeared in 1971, Ludo and the Star Horse in 1974 and A Walk in Wolf Wood in 1980, and all three were adapted for Jackanory. Ludo and the Star Horse won a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Little Broomstick became the 2017 animated feature Mary and the Witch’s Flower, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. A poetry collection, Frost on the Window, came in 1990. The suspense novels continued at a slower pace, among them Touch Not the Cat in 1976 and Thornyhold in 1988. Rose Cottage, in 1997, was her last novel.
The Royal Society of Arts made her a fellow in 1968. The Scottish Parliament gave her a lifetime achievement award in 2006, and in 2009 Durham, the university she had chosen for its bursary, awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters. Frederick Stewart died in 2001. She lived in Edinburgh and near Loch Awe, where she gardened and kept a black and white cat named Tory that lived to eighteen.
Mary Stewart died at home near Loch Awe in Argyll on May 9, 2014. She was 97. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography added her entry in 2022.
Where She Fits in the Legend
Stewart did not work alone in the field. Rosemary Sutcliff had published Sword at Sunset in 1963, a historical novel of a Roman-British Arthur who narrates his own story and has no magic. Stewart worked the same early period from Merlin’s side and added the Sight, Merlin’s gift for knowing things before they happen. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon appeared in 1983, the year of The Wicked Day, and told the legend through its women.
The Merlin books have rarely been out of print since 1970. Medievalist Gillian Polack has written that Stewart’s novels shaped how many recent fantasy and historical fiction writers picture Merlin and Arthur.
Centipede Press, which has also published collector’s editions of Michael Shea and Fritz Leiber, lists its The Crystal Cave as sewn, on acid-free paper, with a dust jacket. It costs $165 and went on sale October 11.
Stewart’s publishers wanted another thriller and got a fifth-century Merlin instead. Which working genre writers are sitting on a book their publishers have told them not to write, and what would it take for a publisher to let them?
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