Fans of Mary Stewart, who would have turned 100 today, may not be pleased to learn that she consigned a sequel to her beloved romantic suspense novel Touch Not the Cat to the shredder. But they will be able to comfort themselves with the imminent release of a long lost novella from the bestselling novelist, who died in 2014 at the age of 97.
Stewart was the pioneer of romantic suspense, topping charts on both sides of the Atlantic with stories of clever, attractive heroines in danger, from 1955’s Madam, Will You Talk?, set in Provence, to 1964’s Corfu-set This Rough Magic. Her 19 adult novels also included the Merlin series, which follow his life in fifth-century Britain. The Wind Off the Small Isles, a 1968 novella that has been out of print for more than four decades and which will be republished by Hodder & Stoughton next week to mark today’s anniversary, was described by Stewart as “a kind of coda” to her romantic novels and a “bridge” to her historical writing.
Set in the Canary Isles, the story is split between two timelines: 1879, where a girl is eloping with a young fisherman from her Lanzarote home, and the 1960s, when Perdita, a typically bright, practical and beautiful Stewart heroine, is assistant to the bestselling novelist Cora Gresham. Stewart’s niece Jennifer Ogden, who lived with the novelist for the last 12 years of her life, calls it a “perfect example of Mary Stewart’s perfect writing”.
Inspired by a visit to Lanzarote, the novella is written with Stewart’s ever-present attention to detail: she visited the Canaries several times with her geologist husband Fred Stewart, says Ogden, and was inspired by the topography and legends of the islands to set the story there. “There was a lot of herself and her life in her books,” explains Ogden. “Her research was tremendous – no matter where she set her books, she travelled there, so all her descriptions were from life, from Provence to Greece.”
Though her obituary in the Guardian suggested that “in subject matter and treatment she was a natural successor to Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë”, Stewart herself was more reticent about categorising her work. In The Wind Off the Small Isles, her author Gresham, discussing fiction with a fiercely literary fellow writer, says that “this is one of those coincidences that nobody would believe if you or I put it into print – at least, if you did they’d say it was a subtle denial of causality, and if I did they’d say it was romantic nonsense”.
“I’d rather just say that I write novels, fast-moving stories that entertain,” Stewart said in one interview. “To my mind there are really only two kinds of novels, badly written and well written. Beyond that, you cannot categorise ... Can’t I just say that I write stories? ‘Storyteller’ is an old and honourable title, and I’d like to lay claim to it.”
When her first book, Madam, Will You Talk?, was taken on by Hodder, Stewart was sent back an edited version. “She scribbled it out and said ‘My writing is better than your edits – please don’t edit my books if you want to publish them,” recalls Ogden. Her former editor, Sue Fletcher, agreed. “Frankly if I found a typo I was lucky. She was very meticulous.”
Her final novel was 1997’s Rose Cottage. “It really was her swansong – it was a much softer book, without the intrigue and the plots,” says Ogden. “She didn’t want to go on like some, with ghostwriters helping and the whole thing not being by her. And she was 81. I think she’d had enough, she’d done what she wanted to do and was very happy pottering in her garden and getting on with her life.”
So Stewart published no more over the final decades of her life. But now, Ogden has revealed the existence of an unpublished children’s story, written in 1953, which was rejected at the time for being “too frightening”. Stewart was also the author of acclaimed children’s novels including The Little Broomstick and A Walk in Wolf Wood, and this latest is with a publisher.
The beginnings of a sequel to Touch Not the Cat will never be seen. “She gave it to me to read and I said, ‘why don’t you sit down and finish it?’ But she said it was too late now,” says Ogden. “She said ‘when I die, I want this shredded – I don’t want anyone else to find it’. And I said that I’d do it, but that I would much rather it wasn’t there for me to do. When it came to it, she’d already done it. So there you go – the last Mary Stewart manuscript ended up in the shredder.”
- The Wind Off the Small Isles by Mary Stewart is published by Hodder & Stoughton on Thursday in hardback and ebook.