Charting the attention to Rosemary Sutcliff & Terry Pratchett with Google Ngram Viewer

I have just discovered the Google Books Ngram Viewer. When you enter phrases it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g. in “English”, “American English”, “British English”, ”English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years. I tried comparing Rosemary Sutcliff, with Geofrrey Trease, Georgette Heyer, JK Rowling, and Terry Pratchett, in the US and UK. This clearly shows the rise and decline in attention to the books of Rosemary Sutcliff.

Author: Anthony Lawton

Chair, Sussex Dolphin, family company which looks after the work of eminent children’s & historical fiction author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). Formerly CEO, chair & trustee of various charity, cultural & educational enterprises in UK. View all posts by Anthony Lawton

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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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Author: Anthony Lawton

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