The mighty Google recognizes us.

Again, we have to apologize for the long, long wait between blog posts. Infrequent updating is a cardinal sin in the world of blogging, but time has gotten away from us. We've got lots of good stuff to post, so hopefully we'll get some interesting things up in the next couple weeks. We've also received lots of emails lately, which we have not answered, but hope to get to very soon. Several people have sent some great old covers -- we'll post them soon.

Today's good news is that I've realized that Mary Stewart Novels now comes up as the third hit on Google when you search for Mary Stewart. Woo hoo! We used to be down on the third page somewhere. Thanks to everyone who has linked to us and let the Googlebot know we're here! And welcome to everyone who has found us recently.

Also of note today -- the blog Romance Vagabonds did a post called "Celebrating Women in Romance" this week, which lists Mary Stewart along with Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Georgette Heyer, and others. Very nice company for the "mother of the modern romantic suspense novel."

Merlin of the Crystal Cave

Sorry for the long lag between posts! I've been busy starting graduate school. But I'm determined to keep the Mary Stewart blog alive. Updating marystewartnovels.com will probably have to wait until winter break!

LadyTink has brought this movie to my attention. I thought that The Moon-Spinners was the only Mary Stewart book that had been made into a movie. I was oh-so-wrong. The Crystal Cave was apparently adapted into Merlin of the Crystal Cave in 1991. Here's the imdb page.

I've looked around at all my local libraries and no one seems to have a copy (not too surprising, I guess). Has anyone seen it? There appears to be a used copy on Amazon for $3. Is it worth it?

More covers!

I decided I needed to own every Mary Stewart book in hardcover. So I did some shopping on Alibris. :)

William Morrow, 1956 edition

William Morrow, 1963 edition

William Morrow, 1965 edition

The only one I'm missing in hardcover is Thunder on the Right, which seems to go for over $75 for the old William Morrow edition. Anyone know why it's so much more expensive? It's my least favorite book, so I won't be spending that much money on one.

I also had to buy this old mass market copy of This Rough Magic. Because you can never have too many copies of This Rough Magic. :)

More fans of Stewart

I have converted my friend Li to the greatness of Mary Stewart. MWAHAHAHA! She loved Nine Coaches Waiting so much that she's now rushed to order more Stewart. I've told her she has to read This Rough Magic next. :)

And Alicia Paulson, creator of the very popular craft blog Posie Gets Cozy, has been reading Rose Cottage and Thornyhold. She loved them, of course. She says Rose Cottage "was the perfect book to read on a blanket under the shade of a tree in the Shakespeare Garden (which is where I read it). Good one."

Similar to Mary Stewart

I'm always interested in finding authors whose books are similar in some way to Mary Stewart's. Same sort of tone, similar plots or settings.

Here are some authors that I've tried and can recommend as very good:

Barbara Michaels is a pseudonym of Barbara Mertz, who also writes historical fiction under the name Elizabeth Peters. Under the Michaels name she writes gothic suspense novels, which often have romantic threads running through them.


Daphne du Maurier is most famous for Rebecca, which is an amazing book. I haven't read any of her others but mean to in the future.


M.M. Kaye wrote a series of "Death in" books. Death in Kashmir, Death in the Andamans, etc. All feature young English women in exotic settings caught in dangerous situations. (She also wrote my favorite children's book of all time, The Ordinary Princess, which is not at all like anything Mary Stewart ever wrote but still fabulous.)


Susanna Kearsley writes lovely suspense novels, some contemporary and some historical (and some a combination of both!). My favorites are The Shadowy Horses and The Winter Sea.

And a few other authors I've seen mentioned as similar to Stewart but haven't read:
Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, Phyllis Whitney

Anyone have any other suggestions?

Mary Stewart on Happy Endings

A quote from the preface to the 1969 Hodder & Stoughton Mary Stewart Omnibus I:

But one convention of the mainstream of adventure fiction I have kept right through my novels, the convention that the good ends happily, the bad unhappily. "That is what fiction means," said Oscar Wilde. We can laugh at it, but it is sound tradition. A complicated plot rounded off with the reader's imagination projected willingly into the future, is a deeply satisfying reading experience. It is also much more difficult to write effectively than the unresolved or the tragic ending.

Mary Stewart in translation

I came across a 1977 article on Mary Stewart in Something About the Author* that says that "Mary Stewart's novels have been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and Icelandic and Slovak." I'm assuming her books have spread even further in the last 25 years, but I'm not sure how to find out the exact number. I cruised the web for cover images and was able to find The Crystal Cave in French, Spanish, and German. Very interesting to see the different cover art used in different countries. The cartoon cover on the Spanish edition is pretty cool.

The National Library of Scotland has an extensive collection of Mary Stewart novels, including many translations. If you search in their catalog, you'll come up with 458 hits for Stewart, Mary, 1916-. That's a lot of different editions. Kasteel in de Alpen is Nine Coaches Waiting in Dutch. Manadisirnar is The Moon-Spinners in Icelandic. Okami mori no noroi is A Walk in Wolf Wood in Japanese.

Of course, it's not at all surprising to me that Mary Stewart is read all over the world. Her protagonists may be perfectly English women, but a good story is a good story the world over.


*Something About the Author, v. 12: 217-219. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1977.