It remains a pleasure to re-read , some months on, The Guardian editorial ‘in praise of’ Rosemary Sutcliff, and some comments posted by Michael Rosen. Continue Reading »
Posted in Autobiography & Biography, Critic's Review, Influence and Inspiration, Reviews | 7 Comments »
I have posted today about education and Facebook! Time to return to more central matters … Late in her life, one interviewer asked Rosemary Sutcliff about the sources which inspired her version of the Arthurian legend in her best-selling book Sword at Sunset. She recalled various, including:
A wonderful book that I found in the war – a little book … it was by an absolute crackpot – it was called The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century. It was all about getting back to the historical Arthur, and the position of people like Vortigern, and people like that – who and what they probably really were. It was… quite crazy, bu I’ve always found a really good crack-pot very often … hits on some idea of what could be true, which the … serious historian would undoubtedly miss.
Vortigern was a 5th-century leader of the Britons. He probably existed, although information about him is shrouded in legend. I have found the book itself. The crackpot was Trelawney Dayrell Reed. The publishers were Methuen.
Posted in Arthurian, Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Tagged Arthurian, Bestseller, King Arthur | Leave a Comment »
I have been trying to nudge upwards the number of followers of (people who “like”) the Facebook ‘page’ on Rosemary Sutcliff. Progress is slow. However the ‘viral effect’ is moving in the right direction, whatever exactly it is. (I have yet to get my head around that, no doubt simple, metric).
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Tagged book, children's literature, historical fiction, reading | Leave a Comment »
This blog is not about education (per se), but Rosemary Sutcliff – who in fact did not go to school until about ten years old, and left at fourteen, but who was passionate about engaging and exciting young people and children. She would, I suspect, have found it unsurprising but depressing that the Secretary of State for Education does not think children and young people are “interested in creating a genuinely world-class education system”. For he said this when he announced changes to the national curriculum review in England (?and Wales) just before Christmas:
The longer timescale will allow for further debate with everyone interested in creating a genuinely world-class education system; teachers, governors, academics, business leaders and parents (my italics AL), as well as giving schools more time to prepare for a radically different and more rigorous approach.
Where is the readiness, indeed desire, to involve young people and children in helping shape the curriculum for the future? And where are the educationalists who should be jumping up and down about the assumption about education implicit in this exclusion of young people? I have seen no significant comment on this, where I would have expected all manner of organisations and people to have raised this and changed this.
via Written Ministerial Statement – National Curriculum Review – The Department for Education.
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Tagged Department for Education, education, Michael Gove, National Curriculum, schools | Leave a Comment »
The Margaret A. Edwards Award is new to me. It honours an author for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature” and is organised by the young adult division of the American Library Association. The 2012 winner is Susan Cooper for The Dark Is Rising series: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark Is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; and Silver on the Tree. I wonder if Susan Cooper drew any inspiration from Rosemary Sutcliff’s work? I have not read the stories; but the press release said that the stories “evoke Celtic and Arthurian mythology” as they recount the adventures of Will Stanton , the last of the ‘immortal Old Ones’, who acquires the ‘Things of Power’ for the ‘Light’ in its battle with the ‘Dark’. Not my sort of book …. but maybe someone who reads this blog has read the stories and can comment?
Posted in Awards, Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Tagged children's literature, Susan Cooper | 2 Comments »
The wonderful Michael Rosen writes eloquently at his blog about the limitations imposed upon children (and teachers) by the national curriculum and SATs regime.
If I want to make myself distressed … all I need to do is focus on the kind of writing that English Year 6 children are asked to write, re-write and re-write again and again and again in the run-up to the SATs test. As a body of writing, it represents the removal of all danger, excitement, desire, problem, dilemma, problem-solving or subversion. It is in effect a censorship of the brain.
But even this over-simplifies. I always say to anyone (not only children) that the great thing about writing poems or stories or life-writing or even accounts of what you’ve done (so-called ‘recounts’) is that the potential in that moment of writing is discovery. However, if you do too much pre-structuring, pre-note-making, pre-planning, you miss one of the great achievements of the invention of writing which is to enable the writer to do the discovering as you write, in the process of writing. It’s as if the pen (or keyboard) is a probe or a spade (see Seamus Heaney’s poem on this) or a fork turning the texts and experiences over as you produce the words on the page (or as M.A.K. Halliday would put it, ‘as you produce the wording’).
Last year, Michael Rosen commented about Rosemary Sutcliff (at the Guardian newspaper , in response to an editorial):
Interesting that Rosemary Sutcliff was writing about the end of an empire at the end of…er…an empire. And does the search for the lost legion echo/refract Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?
Some of us drank in The Eagle of the Ninth two ways: once as a BBC Children’s Hour serial and second time as the book. I can remember hurrying to get home to hear it – moody, dangerous, mysterious – a quest for something real but long gone, a possible solution to an unsolved story…and somehow it had something to do with events that happened a long time ago just where you walked when we were on holiday: on moors, or on wet fields where we were camping. The book made a connection for me between a past and that particular present.
Posted in Autobiography & Biography | Tagged Michael Rosen | Leave a Comment »
Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him
Rosemary Sutcliff. I was probably no older than nine or ten when I read ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ and it had a huge influence on me; it’s one of the reasons I ended up writing about Rome. I was so struck by her imagery of Hadrian’s Wall and the wilds of Scotland, and the idea of the soldiers disappearing there.
via One Minute With: Ben Kane, historical novelist | The Independent.
Posted in Influence and Inspiration, The Eagle of the Ninth Book | Tagged children's books, historical fiction | Leave a Comment »
Anjy posted a fascinating comment at the You Write! page about how well Rosemary Sutcliff‘s style translates into German, and about her powers of description.
I have been addicted to Sutcliff’s book for about 40 years now. I have read everything by her in German and a lot in English and she is one of the very few authors I came across who benefits from translations.
Mostly, when I read a book in German and then in the English original I prefer the original in comparison. Even if the translation is good (not every one is, Harry Potter is a linguistic catastrophe) normally the power and motion of the English is hardly transferred into German. Not so with Rosemary Sutcliff. Even by different translators her books are every bit enjoyable in German, sometimes even more.
Where the English language is strongly built upon verbs and verbal structures (the abundant “-ing-forms” are something every German pupils has to struggle to understand the concept of), German sets the focus much more on nouns and adjectives – and so does Rosemary Sutcliff. When she describes a scene – maybe due to being forced to just sit and watch for so many years of her early life – she concentrates on things that don’t move or change, on colours and textures. Like in later life as a miniature painter she draws her scenes in minute detail – much like a German sentence as Mark Twain depicted it .
I find this most unusual and remarkable and one the increasingly rare examples for an author whose style of writing (not so much the plots) is in direct correspondence with her very special biography.
I look forward to comments on the post….and if you have your own detailed reflections on Rosemary Sutcliff and her work, do please post them at the You Write! page .
Posted in Autobiography & Biography, Reviews | Tagged historical fiction, Mark Twain, translation | Leave a Comment »
Some two decades ago, Rosemary Sutcliff, author of best-selling historical novel Sword at Sunset, suggested that :
“The Arthurian legend contains an essential truth, and I think at present we’re awfully uncertain of our future.Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur ‘lights up’ the Dark Ages. We have a need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.”
Perhaps true of our times now as much as twenty years ago?
Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a best selling historical novel Sword at Sunset derived from the Arthurian legend. She thought the book the one of which she was most proud, for which she would most like to be remembered:
I do think that Sword at Sunset is the best thing I’ve ever written. And probably the best I ever will.
Source: Quondam et Futurus, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1991 (supplied to me by Anne McFadgen – thank you!).
Posted in Arthurian, Autobiography & Biography, Sword at Sunset | Tagged Dark Ages, historical fiction, King Arthur, young adult fiction | Leave a Comment »
Interesting post today from Anne at the ‘You Post’ tab on this site, about the connectedness and origins of Rosemary Sutcliff‘s stories and books of historical fiction.
Anthony’s earlier mention of the 1991 interview with John Withrington got me hunting out my copy for a re-read. We’ve also recently discussed the chronology of the novels linked by the Aquila family dolphin ring.
Readers have often wondered if Rosemary Sutcliff had the whole Aquila family sequence already mapped out when she wrote Eagle of the Ninth, so I thought it might be of interest to note her emphatic reply when Withrington asked about this.
JW: “Sword at Sunset is one of a series in which you use a leitmotif, that of the flawed emerald signet ring, to trace the history of a family from Roman Britain right through to Norman times. The first novel in which you used this was Eagle of the Ninth in 1954, but it appears later in Frontier of the Wolf in 1980. Was it your intention to construct a magnum opus, an epic from start to finish, in which Arthur appeared in the middle?”
RS: “No, it just happened. It did that of its own accord.”
Intriguingly, in this interview Sutcliff indicates more than once that she feels her novels to a certain extent shape themselves or are shaped by their characters – for example a question about The Shining Company elicits the response: “That’s, as I say, because of them, not me”.
Posted in Autobiography & Biography | Tagged children's literature, historical fiction | 2 Comments »
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day, The Roundabout Horse | Leave a Comment »
In my more fanciful moments I find myself wondering whether, in his dealings with Europe, David Cameron may have taken some inspiration from Carausius in Rosemary Sutcliff‘s historical novel The Silver Branch? (Rosemary Sutcliff’s uncle Harold Lawton did live out his later years in Peasemore, the Berkshire village Cameron grew up in … but then we would all do well, politicians in particular, to remember that in all matters correlation is not cause ! )
“If I can make this one province strong—strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness. If not, then Dubris light and Limanis light and Rutupiae light will go out. The lights will go out everywhere”. Carausius stepped back, dragging aside the hanging folds of the curtain, and stood framed in their darkness against the firelight and lamplight behind him, his head yet turned to the grey and silver of the starry night.
More posts about The Silver Branch on this site, and a summary of the story here
Posted in The Silver Branch | Tagged David Cameron | Leave a Comment »
I discovered in 2010 that renowned Cornish writer Anna Maria Murphy was a great fan of Rosemary Sutcliff, author of children’s books and historical fiction. Anna writes for Theatre, as well as radio.
As a girl and a young woman, Rosemary Sutcliff was my absolute favourite writer and The Mark Of The Horse Lord one of my favourite books of all time. She was unlike any other writer for young people … ahead of her time by generations. She was one of the reasons I wanted to write as a young person … I always wanted to meet her … I wrote to her once, and she sent a lovely reply, but I lost the letter many years ago.
Anna began to write for theatre to avoid playing a dog! Her writing for Kneehigh has included ‘Don John’, ‘The Bacchae’, ‘The Red Shoes’, ‘Tristan & Yseult’, ‘Skulduggery’, ‘Doubtful Island’ ‘Ghost Nets’, ‘Women Who Threw the Day Away’, ‘Telling Tales’, ‘Wild Bride’ (The Shamans) and the film ‘Flight’. She has also written for Theatre Alibi, Platform 4, Brainstorm Films, The Eden Project, and several plays for Radio 4.
(Re-post from 2010, slightly updated)
Posted in Reader's Review, The Mark of the Horse Lord | Tagged children's literature, historical fiction, Kneehigh Theatre | 2 Comments »
Like the sudden opening of a cavern in his head, reality burnt upon Phaedrus, and in that ice-bright splinter of time he understood at last that this was a fight to the death, that he was fighting, not his comrade Vortimax, whom he had fought scores and hundreds of times before, but death, red-rending death such as the stag’s had been, and the hooks of the mercuries in the dark alleyway.
(from The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff )
Posted in The Mark of the Horse Lord | Tagged children's literature | Leave a Comment »
I sometimes think that we stand at sunset … It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again … We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.
More about Rosemary Sutcliff‘s award-winning historical novel The Lantern Bearers on this blog
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Leave a Comment »
I posted (see below) a few days ago about Rosemary Sutcliff‘s The Eagle of the Ninth being in the top five Kindle e-book sellers (at that point). I failed at first to notice that at Number 1 was Giselle Greene. She posted a comment, which led me to ask her what she thought Rosemary might have made of Kindle. Giselle said:
I think the idea of Kindle wouldn’t have been so foreign to her – she was a Sagittarian, so working in the realms of imagination all the time … and new possibilities for what might be always come first from what we can imagine. I loved her books and I loved her energy, which was very wise and also beautifully innocent at the same time. I think she’d be chuffed that a whole new generation of people are now accessing and enjoying her work and along with it all the values embedded therein.
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Tagged Kindle | Leave a Comment »
Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines Quartet (Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain), told the The Book Base that some of his favourite books when he was a child were: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien; The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, Asterix and Tin Tin, the Molesworth books…
Posted in Influence and Inspiration | Leave a Comment »
At the start of last year I posted about historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff‘s autobiography Blue Remembered Hills. I noted that a reviewer on the Amazon site - intriguingly at Leicester University in the town where I write this – wrote a decade ago: 
This is a fascinating book on several levels. First it is the story of a young girl, an only child born in 1920, growing up with middle-class parents, but in a fashion which combined the usual practices and mores of the time with the unusual. As she was crippled (her word) at the age of three, her mother insisted on bringing her up herself rather than delivering her to a nanny, and, due in part to her disabilities, and the long periods of treatment made necessary, she had little formal education. However, she discovered books at an early age, initially through being read to, and was a consummate observer of both people and landscape, particularly on a small scale – the play of light on a dagger blade, the petals of a flower.
Second, it is story of the development of a writer, up to the time her first book was accepted for publication (what a pity she stopped there – I wanted her to go on!)
Third, for me as the child of Service parents (father in the RAF) it is the best representation I have ever seen of the life of the Service child. Rosemary’s father was a naval officer, and she, like me, absorbed unconsciously the traditional values and mores of the British Armed Services while moving every two or three years according to her father’s postings. These values, which have a timelessness about them, in particular the reciprocal loyalties of officer to man and man to officer, the duty of an officer towards his men, come through very clearly in all her fiction. As with all her books, the descriptions are superb (she trained as a miniature painter.
The fourth element, I suppose, relates to the disability and her acceptance of it, in an atmosphere very different from that of today. She says that her mother in particular sought as far as possible to bring her up as a normal child, and so she never really thought of herself as crippled, even though in practical terms she was quite badly disabled. I was lucky enough to correspond with her, and to meet her on one occasion before she died, and I was quite surprised to see how disabled she actually was – she was a person who was incredibly alive.
Sources: I prefer reading: Blue remembered hills – Rosemary Sutcliff and here on Amazon
Posted in Autobiography & Biography | Tagged children's literature | Leave a Comment »
It is good to know people are buying and reading Rosemary Sutcliff books (see here), especially on the Kindle. Curiously, the bestselling e-book on Kindle is by Giselle Green, who just before Rosemary’s death in 1992 wrote for The Independent newspaper an insightful article based on an interview at Rosemary’s home in Walberton.
“It was in the Great fire-hall on Barra, in the Outer Hebrides and a terrible storm was brewing up outside. They had just pulled the wicker-work shutters across the membrane of the windows in case the storm blew its way in, but the draughts were still getting in everywhere. You could hear the booming of the waves pitching against the beach . . . the hangings and skins of sailcloths with dragons painted on them billowed up all over the place as if they would come to life. . .”
Rosemary Sutcliff folds her hands over her chest: ”Then my supper arrived. I looked up into a clear, calm evening, and my first thought was – ‘Thank heavens that awful wind’s gone!’ ” A historical novelist for both children and adults, with 53 books to her credit, it is easy to see how, as one reviewer said: ”For Rosemary Sutcliff the past is not something to be taken down and dusted. It comes out of the pages alive, and breathing now . . .”
Posted in Research & Criticism, The Independent (UK) | 3 Comments »
And this!
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Leave a Comment »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF …
sutcliff twitters
- RT @RomanCaerleon: It's unlikely Roman soldiers wore red tunics as it woul have been too expensive. It is thought Hollywood put them in red.__9 hours ago
- RT @domcoyote: Tell @Jeremy_Hunt to end the #Murdoch #BBC robbery! Click here to join: http://t.co/MdcA94JR__9 hours ago
- RT @CarolineLawrenc: I just bought 'The Forgotten Legion (Forgotten Legion Chronicles 1)' by @BenKaneAuthor via @KindleUK__9 hours ago
- RT @paula6hardy: Help @SaveRome: join an archeological dig in Ostia Antica this summer and uncover #Rome's ancient harbour http://t.co/i ...__9 hours ago
- RT @carmitstead: This is more interesting than the headline suggests. I hadn't thought abt the role of women's mags in promoting fiction ...__9 hours ago
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Movie tie-in books in USA
For those of you in North America who have found your way to this blog after watching The Eagle film based on Rosemary Sutcliff's great story The Eagle of the Ninth, the publishers (and I!) invite you to check out the reissue of the entire Roman Britain Trilogy from Square Fish! You can experience "the guts and glory with the movie tie-in edition of The Eagle of the Ninth" and "get the conversation started with their discussion guide".
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![Reviews the widely-read, award-winning historical fiction novelist, writer of children's books and author of fiction for young adults, Rosemary Sutcliff. Compiled by Anthony Lawton (godson and cousin), this blog collects book details, lists, reviews, facts, opinions and personal recollections about this giant of British literature and children's literature, writer of over fifty books. It includes classic best sellers The Eagle of the Ninth, The Lantern Bearers, Sword at Sunset, The Mark of the Horse Lord, Beowulf, Song for a Dark Queen, as well as her autobiography Blue Remembered Hills. [To use: Scroll down this home page for posts. Scroll down these right-side boxes. Use the Tabs at the top for the main pages]](http://rosemarysutcliff.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/rosemary-sutcliff.jpg?w=150&h=140 "Historical novelist, writer of children's books and fiction for young adults, Rosemary Sutcliff")
