Category: Autobiography & Biography

Posts on the rosemarysutcliff.com weblog about the life and thoughts of Rosemary Sutcliff, including what she wrote and said about writing and her own craft.

Rosemary Sutcliff on her schooling, painting and writing

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My schooling began late, owing to a childhood illness, and ended when I was only fourteen, owing to my entire lack of interest in being educated. But I showed signs of being able to paint, and so from school I went to art school, trained hard, and eventually became a professional miniature painter.

I did not start to write until the end of the War, but now I have switched completely from one medium to the other, and it is several years since I last touched paint.

Source: Rosemary Sutcliff’s monograph on Rudyard Kipling.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s first book Wild Sunrise went unpublished

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Rosemary Sutcliff’s first book, the unpublished Wild Sunrise, was about the Roman invasion of Britain told from the British viewpoint. The hero was Cradoc, a name Rosemary Sutcliff used later  in The Eagle of the Ninth and in Sun Horse, Moon Horse.

Her father (George Ernest Sutcliff, who I knew as Uncle George) had a naval hero called Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, who went down with his flagship at the battle of Coronel in 1914.

Wild Sunrise disappeared, which “was as well”, Rosemary said in her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (1983), ‘because so much of me was in it, naked and defenceless’

  • Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Article on Rosemary Sutcliff by Gilian Avery

A mystical communion with the past … and one of the rudest senses of humour in anyone I have met! |An editor on Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

I once found that an editor of Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote (I could not for a long time locate the source, a website on ancient history, but see Anne’s comment below):

 I knew Rosemary as a friend and, briefly, as her editor…most of her best writing was done in the 50s and 60s, beginning with The Eagle of the Ninth and ending with The Mark of the Horse Lord, which is my own favourite. What she really wanted to do, however, was to write romantic novels full of sex, but here her experience, and imagination, let her down. She was crippled by Still’s disease, contracted as a child – many of her protagonists have physical disabilities of one kind or another. She had no movement in her legs, and hands whose work (including writing and miniature painting) was done with just a forefinger and a tiny, rudimentary thumb.

She had, as did Henry Treece, a mystical communion with the past, which enabled her both to recreate tiny details, and to confound military historians with her understanding of the art of battle in any situation she cared to devise. Her sense of place was uncanny, in that she could get no nearer to a site than the seat of a car on an adjacent road. Friends often served as her eyes, and also as her researchers, but it was the conclusions she drew from the evidence, and her re-creations of them, that made her contribution to the literature about the ancient world so distinctive. Where she was simply embellishing recorded history, she was no better than anyone else.

She also had one of the rudest senses of humour in anyone I have met.”

“I, too, was Oxford” | “I, too, was Able” | “I could Walk” | “I did take sugar”

Link Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Ave! The Oxford University “I, too, am Oxford”  initiative Oxford University (Press) published, St Johns College visiting author Rosemary Sutcliff was left with significant physical disabilities from childhood Still’s disease. She surely would have been very supportive of the “I, too, am Oxford” initiative. Our project was inspired by the recent ‘I, too, am Harvard’ initiative. The Harvard project […]

Rosemary Sutcliff | Made the story-teller she was by the stories told to her as a child?

Aside Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Michael Rosen (writer, poet, performer, broadcaster and Professor of Children’s Literature) recently said about children’s literature: Most adult readers were made into the readers they are by the ‘repertoire’ of reading they did as children. The link, then, between children’s literature and adult literature is not so much via the writers as through the reading habits […]