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.

In praise of historical and children’s novelist Rosemary Sutcliff | A Guardian newspaper editorial in 2011

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I am reminded by a tweet I noticed today that Rosemary Sutcliff was praised in an editorial in the Guardian newspaper in 2011.

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.

Eminent historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff made big change to Tristan and Iseult story in 1971

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Inside cover of retelling of Tristan and Iseult by Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff wrote in the foreword to her “starkly simple” retelling of the story of Tristan and Iseult (OUP, 1971) about “one big change” she made in the story:

… In its far-back beginnings, Tristan is a Celtic legend, a tale woven by harpers around the peat fire in the timber halls of Irish or Welsh or Cornish chieftains, long before the time of chivalrous knights and fair ladies and turreted castles in which it is generally set.

The medieval troubadours took it and enriched it, and dressed it in beautiful medieval clothes, but if you look, you can still see the Celtic story, fiercer and darker, ad (despite the changes) more real, underneath. In this retelling I have tried to get back to the Celtic original as much as possible, and in doing this I have made one big change in the story.

In all the versions that we know, Tristan and Iseult fall in  love because they accidentally drink together a love potion which was meant for Iseult and her husband King Marc on their wedding night. Now the story of Tristan and Iseult is basically the same as two other great Celtic love stories, Diarmid and Grania, and Deidre and the sons of Usna, and in neither of them is there any suggestion of a love potion. I am sure in my own mind that the medieval storytellers added it to make the excuse for being in love with each other when Iseult was married to somebody else. And for me, this turns something that was real and living and part of themselves into something artificial, the result of drinking a sort of magic drug.

So I have left out the love potion.

Because everybody else who has retold the tale in the past eight hundred years has kept it in, it is only fair to tell you this. I can only tell the story  in the way which feels right to me in my own heart of hearts.

… Sophie was a most enchanting old bitch, tiny, pretty, gay, loving and obviously intelligent … (Rosemary Sutcliff Diary, 19th June, 1989)

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

June 19th Monday. Over to Burgess Hill , Joan and I in absolutely blistering heat and returned with the most enchanting (? & naughty) old bitch, tiny, pretty & gay & loving, and obviously intelligent. Called Flash, which we are in process of changing to Sophie. Basty very doubtful, but less hostile than I had suspected at this stage. Read More »

1959 Carnegie Medal awarded to Rosemary Sutcliff for historical novel The Lantern Bearers

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The Carnegie Medal for 2013  is awarded today. The Medal is awarded every year in the UK to the writer of an outstanding book for children. (2013 shortlist here).

The eminent Rosemary Sutcliff  (1920-92) won the (former) Library Association Carnegie Medal in 1959 for her historical novel for children The Lantern Bearers (she wrote for children”aged 8 to 88″, she said).  She was runner-up with Tristan and Iseult in 1972. Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff donated to RSPB for land on the Abernethy Forest Estate

Anthony Lawton6 Comments

I found this amongst things of Rosemary Sutcliff’s as I cleared up my house for a move to the country from Leicester city. She was a great lover of nature and wildlife.

Rosemary Sutcliff RSPB land gift

 

Abernethy Forest is a  coniferous forest stretching from the Braes of Abernethy in the east to the River Spey in the west, and from the valley of the River Spey  south into the Cairngorm Mountains. Apparently at Loch Garten there is an osprey nesting site managed by the RSPB. A bit of internet sleuthing tells me : “The area is also important for its invertebrate fauna which includes  350 species of beetle, 11 species of dragonfly and over 280 species of moths and butterflies.”