Mary Stewart
Mary Stewart was an author.
Born Mary Rainbow, she lectured in English at Durham until her 1945 marriage to a geologist made her Mary Stewart. She wrote through the 1950s and 1960s, lived most of her life in Scotland, and died in 2014 at ninety-seven.
She more or less assembled the modern romantic suspense novel. The pattern she settled on was a capable young woman alone in an unfamiliar and usually foreign place, a landscape described with real attention, a mystery that turns out to involve somebody local and dangerous, and a romance that develops through competence rather than rescue. Her heroines notice things, act on what they notice, and are rarely required to be saved, which was not the industry standard at the time she was writing it.
Then, well into her career, she wrote the Merlin books, and they are a different order of achievement. Narrated in the first person by Merlin himself, they take the Arthurian material and treat it as history, with the magic kept low and ambiguous: an enchanter who is mostly a very observant man with an intermittent gift. That sequence sits between the historical novel and fantasy without settling into either, and it is the work she will keep being read for. She also published poetry and a few books for children.
Books (6)
Where to start with Mary Stewart
The Crystal Cave first. It opens the Merlin sequence and it is the best thing she wrote: a boy of uncertain parentage in post-Roman Britain, learning what he can do and how little of it he controls. The Hollow Hills continues directly. The third volume, The Last Enchantment, is not among the credits listed here.
For the suspense novels, The Gabriel Hounds is the most enjoyable, with a young Englishwoman visiting an eccentric relative in a crumbling Lebanese palace, and it shows the house style in full: a real place, a woman with nerve, trouble that is nobody's idea of gothic decoration. Touch Not the Cat is the strangest of them, running a thread of telepathy through an English inheritance plot, and Stormy Petrel is a late, mild, pleasant one for when you want the tone without the tension. Ludo and the Star Horse is for children and quite unlike the rest.