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.
Many people started reading Rosemary Sutcliff books in their youth and still re-visit them. Some have kindly posted comments around this blog. Today Jenny, commenting upon the pleasure of re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff, recalled some words from Frontier Wolf :
‘Lucius and his Gregorics!…He must know it by heart, but when Alexios had once said that to him, he had said in his quiet, rather serious way that he knew the taste of honey by heart, too, but it still tasted sweet on barley-bannock …’
“It was in the Great fire-hall on Barra, in the Outer Hebrides and a terrible storm was brewing up outside. They had just pulled the wicker-work shutters across the membrane of the windows in case the storm blew its way in, but the draughts were still getting in everywhere. Read More »
Rosemary Sutcliff once responded to a journalist’s suggestion that she made writing sound painless, even enjoyable, by shaking her head:
”No, it’s not really painless or enjoyable. Writing is perhaps just one degree less frightful than not writing!”
Rosemary Sutcliff believed that different stories needed different words strung together in different ways, she wrote in the post-script to fellow story-teller Henry Treece’s novel The Dream Time.
Different kinds of stories need to be told in different kinds of words strung together in different ways. Henry Treece Read More »
The Eagle of the Ninth book by Rosemary Sutcliff, now also a film, was illustrated by C Walter Hodges (1909-2004) who was educated at London’s Dulwich College from 1922-25. The school has an intriguing, well organised record of illustrious former students. I had not known C Walter Hodges illustrated historical novelist Elizabeth Goudge, an important influence on Rosemary Sutcliff. Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 