Of the 1961 cover of Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘classic’ historical novel Dawn Wind Katherine Langrish writes: ” It looks more modern, perhaps because Charles Keeping, who illustrated nearly all her books, was such a strong and innovative artist. In fact, the art here is almost more important than the title, and the author’s own name all but fades into the dark shadows at the children’s feet. Today we’d be wailing for gilt or silver foil to ‘lift’ the cover. And yet I’d hate to see this changed. You could recognise ‘a Rosemary Sutcliff’ at a glance, precisely because Keeping’s style twinned with her historical genius made such a fantastic pairing.” , the thoughts of Katherine Langrish was writing about ‘what’s in-or on-a cover’, in An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, the self-styled ‘ramblings of a few scattered authors’.
Charles Keeping cover for Rosemary Sutcliff historical novel Dawn Wind
17/02/20102010 by Anthony Lawton
Posted in Dawn Wind, Illustrators and Illustration | Tagged Charles Keeping | Leave a Comment
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- The Eagle of the Ninth Film | Summary Film and Book Story
- The 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy view on eminent award-winnng British writer Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92) | “An imagination … powerful enough to create startling pictures of what could have been.
past posts
the guardian newspaper in praise of rosemary sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – "a place where two worlds met without mingling" as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel's central character, is posted.
Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of "other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling". This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.
The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff's unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff's finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.
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