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 fused history, memory and imagination

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

A speech by the David Miliband (former UK Foreign Secretary; current MP) to the Anne Frank Trust set me thinking about what makes Rosemary Sutcliff’s writing so powerful for so many readers. Perhaps it is the fusion of history (her research was meticulous), memory (she believed in re-incarnation), and imagination.

History and memory are not the same thing.  The Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks has written that history is someone else’s story – in other words it is information.  However, memory is one’s own story – it’s about identity.  But in Anne Frank’s diary memory and history are fused.
Source: Anne Frank | David Miliband website

Historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s letter to Helen Hollick

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Helen Hollick blogged about historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff. She includes a photo of part of a letter Rosemary wrote to her. It contains Rosemary Sutcliff’s highly distinctive signature, and is written in her distinctive handwriting.

Part of a etter from Rosemary Sutcliff to Helen Hollick

Source: Helen Hollick’s blog on Rosemary Sutcliff

Life will go on and is well worth the struggle | Faith from Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Responding to an earlier post quoting Margaret Meek on  in her eponymous monograph about historical novelist and doyen of children’s literature  Rosemary Sutcliff, reader and regular commenter Anne (much more knowledgeable than me about the details of Rosemary’s work. and commentary upon it) posted:

It seems appropriate to add this piece from another critical essay, this one by May Hill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland:

The theme of all (Sutcliff’s) stories, as Margaret Meek points out, is “the light and the dark. The light is what is valued, what is to be saved beyond one’s own lifetime. The dark is the threatening destruction that works against it.” In The Lantern Bearers… the blackness of despair is concentrated in the heart of Aquila, a Roman officer….

No briefing of these stories can give any conception of their scope and power, and when young people read them they live with nobility… Nevertheless, these are difficult books, not because of vocabulary problems, but because of the complexities of the plots in which many peoples are fighting for dominance.

Fortunately, Dawn Wind …, one of the finest of the books, is also the least complex. Chronologically it follows The Lantern Bearers, but it is complete in itself and will undoubtedly send some readers to the trilogy. For the fourteen-year-old hero Owain, the light of the world seems to have been extinguished. He finds himself the sole survivor of a bloody battle between the Saxons and the Britons in which his people, the Britons, were completely destroyed. In the gutted remains of the city from which he had come, the only life the boy finds is a pitiable waif of a girl, lost and half-starved. At first Owain and Regina are bound together in mutual misery, but eventually they are united in respect and affection. So when Regina is sick and dying, Owain carries her to a Saxon settlement, even though he knows what will happen to him. The Saxons care for the girl but sell Owain into slavery…. After eleven years, he is freed and sets out at once to find his people and Regina, who has never doubted he would come for her.

So life is not snuffed out by the night. A dawn wind blows and two people start all over again with those basic qualities that have always made for survival…. Rosemary Sutcliff gives children and youth historical fiction that builds courage and faith that life will go on and is well worth the struggle.

Source: May Hill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland, “Historical Fiction: ‘The Lantern Bearers’ and ‘Dawn Wind’,” in their “Children and Books”, pub. Scott, Foresman and Company, 1972, pp. 508-9

Can mizzle be a noun as well as a verb? | Twitter debate!

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

As highlighted by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian last year, Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote  in her great historical novel and classic of children’s literature The Eagle of the Ninth about a ‘ battle fought through the grey drizzle of a west country dawn (which) is illuminated by “firebrands that gilded the falling mizzle and flashed on the blade of sword and heron-tufted war spear” ‘. I drew attention to this article once again with a post last week. Someone tweeted in response that they were surprised to come across ‘mizzle’ as a noun. Hence this set of tweets  in the  last 24 hours (read from the bottom):

On Mizzle in Rosemary Sutcliff's writing

Hallucinations of Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Sandra Garside-Neville has written an insightful appreciation of Rosemary Sutcliff. She notes that as a child Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, a form of juvenile arthritis, and spent much of her youth in hospital for painful operations. Drawing on Rosemary’s own autobiography, she also notes that as a very young girl, the arsenic in Rosemary’s medicine caused her to hallucinate: she saw a panther, wolves and snakes despite not knowing what they were. Years later, she came across them in Kipling’s books.

Another effect of illness that Garside-Neville draws attention to was that Rosemary Sutcliff spent much time sitting still looking, rather than moving around and investigating which meant that she developed an acute eye for observation. In fact, again as Garside-Neville points out, author Alan Garner has commented that children’s authors often have two things in common – they were deprived of the usual primary schooling, and they were ill and left to their own company. Certainly true of Sutcliff.