Mary Stewart (b. 1916) Sunderland, County Durham, England
Author of twenty-four books including suspense, historical fiction, children’s books, and poetry.
I suppose that my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out. She dwindled from a potential Morgan le Fey into an English vicar’s wife, and ran the parish, as one could in those days say … with an iron hand disguised by no glove at all.” Thus begins Thornyhold, one of Mary Stewart’s delightful literary bon bons.
There are sometimes unexpected rewards in cleaning out the detritus of one’s life. Sifting through the contents of bookshelves groaning under the weight of their stacks and brown-cardboard boxes bursting at the corners, one sometimes finds the golden treasures of lighter times. Last Friday, I found Thornyhold, neither seen nor read for some twenty years.
Thornyhold, like Ms. Stewart’s other books, is a delightful escape to another place and time. In fluid but measured prose, she takes an unconventional situation and builds a story on the full-blooded reactions of the characters who inhabit it. In this case, the situation is Gilly Ramsey’s of the lonely childhood in a coal-mining town just prior to and during World War I. Her gentle and loved father is mostly absent and often no match for her stern and undemonstrative, though not entirely unloving, mother. To add to her misery, Gilly is allowed no pets or friends. Eventually, a bewitching and empathetic aunt intervenes, funding a boarding school education. However this environment challenges Gilly: smart, pretty, but not terribly skilled at or confident in the social arts.
Gilly’s bright star is that charming and enigmatic aunt. The aunt is thought to be a witch. She refers to herself as a wise woman. Without a doubt she has some prescience. She is also quite a botanist and a skilled herbalist. After the deaths of her parents and her aunt, Gilly learns that her aunt has intervened again, leaving Gilly an old Georgian home in an agrarian setting where everyone knows your business or at least thinks they do. It is surrounded by gardens, woods, and mysterious neighbors. The house, called Thornyhold, was once the home of a well-known witch. It is upon Gilly’s move to her aunt’s home with its history and secrets that the story begins to spin its magic and mystery and Gilly blossoms with new confidence and a first – and forever – love.
Thornyhold is an old-fashioned love story, but it is also the story of how people learn, and grow, and come to find meaning in their own lives and those of others. And, yes, it was lovely to read Thornyhold again and to visit with my old friends. The only downside is that I finished the book too quickly. Time to look for another sweet something to bookworm my day away . . .
