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 researching and writing her historical novels

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Rosemary Sutcliff told one interviewer in the early 1960s:

‘I get down to what I enjoy much more, recreating the daily life of the people: the sort of houses they lived in, how they were furnished, what food they ate and how it was cooked, what they grew in their gardens, how they travelled, their clothes and weapons, and, very important from my point of view, what songs they sang and what stories they told round the fire at night.’

Margaret Meek's monograph on Rosemary Sutcliff

Source: Meek, M., 1962. Rosemary Sutcliff (Bodley Head, London). p 13.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s thank-you address to the American Children’s Literature Association in Arbor, Michigan, 19th May 1985 | For the Phoenix Award for The Mark of the Horse Lord

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Rosemary Sutcliff sent an address to the Children’s Literature Association in Arbor, Michigan, 19th May 1985 when she received the Phoenix Award for The Mark of the Horse Lord. This is an excerpt.

The Mark of the Horse-Lord  is one of my best-beloved books, amongst my own, and has remained so warmly living in my mind, though I have never re-read it, that when I heard that it had won an award for a book published twenty years ago, my first thought was “How lovely!! But my second was, ‘But it can’t be anywhere near twenty years old; it’s one of my quite recent books; there must be some mistake!” And I made all speed to get it out of the bookcase and look at the publication date, to make sure. And having got it out, of course I started reading it again.

Re-reading a book of my own is for me (and I imagine for most authors) a faintly nerve-wracking process, Read More »

Songs, stories and history link Pete Seeger and Rosemary Sutcliff?

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Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen turned to the work of Pete Seeger – the folk musician and activist who died yesterday aged 95 – to re-energise himself. As Richard Willams has put it in The Guardian today:

When Springsteen recognised the need to drag himself out of a becalmed period at the start of the new millennium, it was to Seeger’s music that he turned for inspiration. The Seeger Sessions, with their joyful sing-along versions of We Shall Overcome and Jacob’s Ladder, would be the catalyst for his artistic regeneration.

It was the perfect of example of Seeger’s belief in the folk process, the invisible but enduring mechanism by which source material survives being handed on and transformed at the hands of successive eras. Speaking to Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker, Springsteen remarked that Seeger ‘had a real sense of the musician as historical entity – of being a link in the thread of people who sing in others’ voices and carry the tradition forward … and a sense that songs were tools, and, without sounding too pretentious, righteous implements when connected to historical consciousness’.

As with songs so too with the stories Rosemary Sutcliff re-told (such as Tristan and Iseult) or re-imagined (her many works of historical fiction). Re-working Springsteen, we might perhaps say that Rosemary Sutcliff had a real sense of being a link in the thread of people who tell stories and carry  tradition forward, and a sense that stories were tools, cultural and social implements when connected to historical consciousness?

Source of quotes here.

“I had a lonely childhood and growing-up time” | Children’s book writer and historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff

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Books for Keeps Issue 64 (1990) Cover

Margaret Meek, an academic at The Institute of Education in London, wrote a monograph about Rosemary Sutcliff, and later, a tribute to her on her 70th birthday in Books for Keeps, in 1990.

There’s a revealing paragraph in the collection of stories which (Rosemary Sutcliff) edited with Monica Dickens, Is Anyone There?, where she says: `I had a lonely childhood and growing-up time. My parents loved me and I loved them, but I could never talk to them about the problems and fears and aching hopes inside me that I had most need to talk about to someone. And there was no one else.’

Writers cannot be convivial people in work time; their chosen craft is a solitary one. But to be cut off in childhood from the society of the school playground, where the gossipy tales are told, is a particular deprivation. Rosemary Sutcliff could never have been a chatty novelist. Yet her experience of being read to throughout her childhood by a sympathetic adult (her mother) bears out everything that has been researched or said about reading stories to children. If you want to understand where Rosemary Sutcliff, as a novelist, `comes from’, read The Jungle Books, Kim and The Just So Stories, preferably aloud.

… To read Rosemary Sutcliff is to discover what reading is good for. So this anniversary and this accomplishment make me ask what might be the contemporary appeal or, more simply, the enduring attraction of the historical novels for the young. After all, much has clearly changed in children’s books and reading since television became their more immediate storyteller, and novelists, now more matey and informal, adopted a more elliptical vernacular prose, in which the readers’ ease is more visible than the challenge to read … (Her) first page swings the characters into action in a situation as clear as a television image. The names of the people and places set the rules of belonging; the relations between the sexes are formally arrayed; the battles are long and fierce. Readers who are unaccustomed to the building up of suspense in poised sentences may need a helping hand …  the best way into a Sutcliff narrative, a kind of initiation, is to hear it read aloud. Then you know what the author means when she says she tells her tales `from the inside’.

Source: Books For Keeps, Issue 64.

Chronicler of Occupied Brittania | Rosemary Sutcliff’s life and work | Obituary from The Guardian newspaper

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

Let us not be solemn about the death of Rosemary Sutcliff CBE, who has died suddenly, aged 72, despite the progressively wasting Still’s disease that had been with her since the age of two. She was impish, almost irreverent sometimes, in her approach to life. Her favourite author was Kipling and she once told me she had a great affection for The Elephant’s Child – because his first action with his newly acquired trunk was to spank his insufferably interfering relations.

But it was Kipling’s deep communion with the Sussex countryside and its history that was her true inspiration. Settled as an adult in Arundel, Rosemary shared with him his love for his county as well as his vision of successive generations living in and leaving their mark upon the landscape.

Rosemary Sutcliff, at the peak of her form in her ‘Roman’ novels, was without doubt an historical writer of genius, and recognised internationally as such. Read More »