Book covers of historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff King Arthur novels and retellings
March 15, 2010 by Anthony Lawton
Posted in Illustrators and Illustration | Tagged children’s books, children’s literature, historical fiction, Sword at Sunset, The Light Beyond the Forest, The Road to Camlann, The Sword and the Circle | Leave a Comment
rosemary sutcliff
"An impish … irreverent writer of genius" (The Guardian)
rosemary sutcliff
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- "Aim for the stars and you may end up on a lamp-post”—#motto of Rosemary Sutcliff | 4 hours ago
- Am reminded by Dwarkins debate that @guardianstyle once advised me it’s <fairytale> and neither ‘fairy tale’, nor ‘fairy-tale’. | 5 hours ago
- .@HornBook I think Rosemary Sutcliff was awarded the Horn Book Award for her retellling of the story of Tristan and Iseult, in 1972? | 5 hours ago
- .@Joannechocolat For children, from the #LiteraryBakery: The BLT, by Roll Dahl. | 7 hours ago
- RT @PhilipPullman: On the subject of Richard Dawkins and fairy tales, I wrote this piece for the New Statesman a while ago: http://t.co/2cP… | 7 hours ago
- If you "get a Desmond” you get a 2:2 (as opposed to 2:1) level degree: rhyming slang from Desmond Tutu! #NewToMe | 10 hours ago
- RT @EmmaJayneBowey: @9inchsnails @rsutcliff @wendyorr maybe Rosemary Sutcliff was reflecting on women of her own time, rather than in histo… | 11 hours ago
- A message from the past for @RichardDawkins from emminent story-teller Rosemary Sutcliff, to add to @Joannechocolat http://t.co/6Q9C7ONLUU | 11 hours ago
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the guardian, 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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