Madam, want to talk about author Mary Stewart? discussion

I just finished this one today. Short as it was at just under 200 pages, another excellent offering from Dame Stewart. Loved the setting on the Isle of Skye in Scotland and loved the way she set the spooky scenes with the swirling mists and shifting bogs.

Isn't this the one with the Queen's coronation and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mt. Everest? So we know it's set in 1953 (my birth year) - that makes it very special for me!

Yes, that's the one.

Lorraine wrote: "Isn't this the one with the Queen's coronation and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mt. Everest? So we know it's set in 1953 (my birth year) - that makes it very special for me!"

I love WaM. One of my very favorite Stewart suspense novels.

I recently re-read Wildfire at Midnight. I first read it about 40 years ago and then re-read about 30 years ago if I recall correctly.

I remembered it being tense and eerie and even hair-raising at times with an effectively rendered remote Scottish setting and a closed circle of characters/suspects. I still feel that way.

However, on this reading the protagonist's seriously antiquated attitudes jumped out at me. She's divorced and laments the fact that when she found out her husband was cheating on her on business trips (not wanting her to accompany him anymore and bringing other women instead) she blew up and let him have it. She berates herself for losing him because she didn't hold her tongue and keep quiet.

Then she advises another woman whose husband is cheating on her....with a guest at their hotel while they're on vacation!!....to swallow her pride and shut up and let it blow over if she wants to hang onto her husband.

There's some more of this self-abasement but that's enough to get the gist.

Now I realize that a book published in 1956 will often contain some outdated and sexist notions and I'm usually pretty tolerant of that, but this is so beyond the pale it mars the book for me.

Exactly, couldn't bring myself to finish it

I still love parts of this book, but there’s no denying that it hasn’t aged at all well on the relationship issues.

It’s one of my favourites, very exciting. I didn’t mind the bit about her regretting leaving her husband, I have known women who would rather have their husbands unfaithful than not have them at all, so I could understand it. If the man is attractive enough, he can get away with a lot sometimes.