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.

Writer of historical fiction and children’s literature Rosemary Sutcliff didn’t write as child at school

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Rosemary Sutcliff spent a limited time in formal school education, but it did not hinder her  in becoming what The Guardian newspaper called on her death ‘a writer of genius’.

I didn’t go to school for a very long time because of traipsing around so much. My mother used to educate me herself, chiefly by just reading to me the books that she liked. (But I did go to school, and I’ve always been very thankful that I went to an ordinary school, I never got incarcerated with other disabled children).

(But) chiefly I had books read to me, which is a thing I love to this day. I didn’t learn to read for myself until I was very old. Me and Kipling, we were both nine before we could read: I think in my case  this was because my mother read aloud to me so much, and this I loved very very much.

I left school, which one could do at fourteen in those days, and put in three years at art school. I did the general art course—painting in oils and water-colours and making charcoal drawings of the Apollo Belvedere from the north, south, east, and west!

I had not written as a child, I had not written stories. I wasn’t at all writing-minded at school.

Rosemary Sutcliff, disabled by juvenile arthritis, was thankful to go to inclusive school, not ‘incarcerated with other disabled children’

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Rosemary Sutcliff was very ill as a child with juvenile arthritis. She spent much of her time when very young in hospital or a spinal carriage ‘rather like a coffin’, only went to school aged nine, and was disabled from the disease all her life.

A spinal carriage was rather like a coffin; it was very uncomfortable, and you lay flat out in this thing, and of course all you could see were the branches of the trees or the roofs of the houses going by overhead. And it was extremely boring. With any luck you were perhaps allowed to sit up on the way home from a walk.

Spinal carriage similar to Rosemary Sutcliff's

I didn’t go to school for a very long time …My mother used to educate me herself, chiefly by just reading to me the books that she liked. But I did go to school, and I’ve always been very thankful that I went to an ordinary school, I never got incarcerated with other disabled children.

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4 kinds of people in Malta that author of historical fiction and children’s literature, Rosemary Sutcliff, remembers from her childhood

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Rosemary Sutcliff’s father was a naval officer, posted to Malta when she was very young.

I remember little cameos of Malta. I remember branches of an orange tree hanging over a wall. And I remember the people coming and going in the streets. Four kinds of people in particular: priests, who I remember as wearing lace petticoats. You know one’s memory is a little kind of peculiar at that age—I was only about three. Goats, usually with a paper bag hanging out of their mouths, because they ate anything and everything, and used to be milked on the doorstep, which was a great way of spreading Malta fever I believe. Sailors of course, everywhere; and in those days still a great many women wearing the faldetta, which I don’t suppose you would ever see in Malta nowadays, which was a very becoming head-dress.

Rosemary Sutcliff speaks on when and why she started writing stories, and became a published author.

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Rosemary Sutcliff spoke about when and why she started writing when she spoke on BBC Radio’s famous Desert Island Discs programme.

I set up as a miniaturist and found commissions coming in. In the war I had quite lot of work to do: quite often, rather sadly, from photographs of young soldiers who weren’t coming back, and things of that sort. I worked at home, and also at the local art school (in Bideford); I was allowed to use a room. I enjoyed it, but I found miniature painting cramping. I was a good craftsman—but I always had this feeling of having my elbows tucked too close to my sides when I was doing it.

I think for this very reason, that I began to feel that I’d got to do something to break out. I gave it up to write. And I could write as big as ever I wanted to, I could use an enormous canvas if I wanted to.

I had not written as a child, I had not written stories. I wasn’t at all writing-minded at school. I don’t know when it started, I just wanted to write. And I scribbled happily most of the time through the war. It was quite dreadful, it was rather a mixture of Jeffery Farnol and Georgette Heyer. They’re both good writers, but I took the worst elements from both of them.

Rosemary Sutcliff talked 30 years ago about her childhood, disability, painting, historical fiction, children’s literature, on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs

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Within her conversation in 1983 on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, Rosemary Sutcliff  made a wealth of informative and moving comments about her life and work, some ten years before she died in 1992. These statments are extracted from the transcript:

To my shame I have to admit that I was born in Surrey, but  I count myself as a West Country woman, as a Devonshire woman.

Music is important in my life, but I’m not musical, I don’t know a thing about how it works. I’m one of those dreadful people who just ‘know what they like’.

I have a great fondness for good old-fashioned American cowboy films.

My very first memory is from when I was only eighteen months old, and we know that it was so because I was never in the place that it happened again until I was seven. I was taken for a walk—I was taken along a path, and I came out from the narrowness of this path into an open space, where there were things in cages. Notably a squirrel, restlessly sort of wandering round and round his cage, obviously with a headache. And all the injustices and sorrows of the world broke over my head for the first time at that sight, and I broke forth into bellows of tears and had to be removed from the park.

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