Such a long title for these 2 short stories, which come to just a little over 100 pages in all. This will not be a review which is demanding or interrogating, because much of the pleasure of reading a Mary Stewart story is the easy reading and unchallenging nature of the experience. That said, just because a Stewart read is unchallenging, does not in any way detract from the great pleasure of being in the hands of a committed story teller.
I would not go so far as Jennifer Ogden, Mary Stewart’s niece who wrote a charming foreword to this volume, who talks of Mary Stewart’s writing as “perfect writing”. I have read almost all of Stewart’s romance-adventure as well as historical-adventure novels, and as you’d expect from such an extended oeuvre, some are better than others. Although none were perfect, many were quite delightful, and a few were perhaps just a little less well-crafted than the others. But none disappointed, and none were dull. It was heart-warming to read Ogden’s testimony that her Aunty Mary to whom Ogden was constant companion for the last 12 years of Mary Stewart’s life, had a great sense of humour, was kind and generous, and loving to her nieces of nephews. Apparently, Ogden says
We took the place of the children she could never have
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Ogden writes of her as an “extraordinary and fascinating woman” with “flashes of brilliance”, a
beautiful woman who always smelled heavenly (Chanel comes to mind now), who was exquisitely dressed and always came armed with presents
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Ogden may not be impartial, but this is still a truly charming peek at the woman behind all these books, and indeed, this portrait is entirely in keeping with the tone and style of the Stewart novels.
Ogden’s foreword lets us know that Mary Stewart visited the scene of her short story in Lanzarote with her husband, Fred, a geologist and professor at Edinburgh University.
The Wind of the Small Isles is like pretty much all the other Stewart romance-adventure novels, where you have a young, plucky heroine in a fairly exotic setting, a young British woman who is exceptionally self-sufficient and independent, and enjoying exploring caves or mountainsides or whatever natural setting she is in, and who comes across some miscreants totally unrelated to her own life. She also comes across some lovely British young man who will be the hero and lover of course, although the first encounters with these heroes almost always find them gruff and unwelcoming (always for good reasons of course, later revealed!), almost as if Stewart’s heroines would hardly trust some suave, smooth-talking, out-to-impress/please young gallant if that was how they came across at first encounter. No, the young lovers must always have/encounter some reserves which they very quickly overcome in their attraction to each other. It is both quaint and charming a device, and not less so because it has become so formulaic in her novels!
23 year-old Perdita is our heroine this time,
p.a., chauffeur, dog, devil and dairy-maid, and whatever you call the person who is sent out in front to draw the fire
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for her author-employer, Cora Gresham, who wants to visit Lanzarote for background colour in her new book. To reveal more of the plot would be a spoiler, but Wind off the Small Isles has a double barrelled romance, Perdita’s as well as Maria Dolores’s teenaged romance set more than a century ago when the volcano erupted. Interestingly, in Maria’s time, Lanzarote was apparently quite a prosperous producer of cochineal dye, though its fortunes had declined by the time Perdita visits, as a result of synthetically produced dyes, and island terrain which was not much good for farming alternative plants other than the bushes the cochineal beetles used to eat.
The 2nd story also features Perdita, with her mother this time, an elegant, incorrigible woman (whom I cannot help thinking may rather be like Mary Stewart herself, especially if I mentally cast Jennifer Ogden in Perdita’s role) who run into an adventure together when their car breaks down one night as they are driving from Newcastle. The two women approach a lighted house for help on a deserted stretch, and encounter a situation which at first baffles them, but which soon has Perdita inadvertently right at the centre of the excitement. Like all Stewart’s stories, although our heroine is momentarily endangered, one’s heart never really needs to beat faster, because we know all will end well, and that although our heroine may be frightened, even bruised and scraped a little along the way, she will not be seriously harmed. Safe adventure, if the oxymoron can be permitted.
And again, this is not intended to be disparaging, because Stewart books are eminently readable, very much comfort-reading, always interesting without ever straying into the distressing, either on the action front or the romance front. Stewart is intensely British in her style, so never sentimental or saccharine; rather, her tone is brisk and light but sympathetic, beautifully descriptive in some context-setting passages, and moves the action on at a good pace so that the story does not flag. It was a pleasure to come across her two short stories in this slim volume when I thought I had already finished all the Stewart novels and exhausted that vein. Now I think maybe one could revisit the previous reads, and revive that experience of reassuring pleasure.
Love Stewart’s Arthurian books, especially the first. (They got a bit depressing in the later books, just because of the story) I think of her as a classic British Council Library author 🙂
It’s interesting to read what she was like as a person.
I laughed at that description, but love it, so apt, a British Council Library author!
She seems to have been a lovely lady in her own right. I found the majority of her adventure-romance novels very readable!