Category: Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards

Posts on rosemarysutcliff.com, Rosemary Sutcliff’s official website, about Literary Criticism, Reviews and Research about her; and about national and international Awards she received.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s recreation of the past is effortless | Returning to The Lantern Bearers

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The Lantern Bearers by historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff, first published in 1959, won the prestigious  Carnegie Medal that year. An American reviewer wrote some twenty years later …

I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in my early teens, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. I can still vividly recapture the magic of reading her books. It was a real pleasure to return to The Lantern Bearers, which I first read when I was about thirteen, and find the magic still intact. … The Lantern Bearers is a wonderful book. Sutcliff possesses a unique gift for character and description, evoking a sense of place and person so intense that the reader can almost see her characters and the world in which they move. She has a matchless ability to establish historical context without a surfeit of the “let’s learn a history lesson now” exposition that mars many historical novels for young people. Her books are never less than meticulously researched, but her recreation of the past is so effortless that one has no sense of academic exercise, but rather of a world as close and immediate as everyday.

…  The Arthurian theme was one of Sutcliff’s favorites: she produced several young adult books on the subject, as well as a beautiful adult novel, Sword at Sunset, to my mind one of the best ever written in this genre. But the Sutcliff’s Arthur is rooted as much in history as in myth–not just the tragic king of Le Morte d’Arthur or the heroic/magical figure of traditional Arthurian fantasy, but a man who might actually have existed, heir both to the memory of Rome and to the last great flowering of Celtic power in Britain.
…  her enduring popularity … is richly merited: she is, quite simply, one of the best.

Copyright © 1997 Victoria Strauss

(First posted, April 29th, 2009)

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman Britain novels are historical fiction at its best, a seamless blend of fiction with history

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman Britain series is historical fiction at its best – excellent historical details, interesting characters, compelling stories, and a seamless blend of fiction with history. Though ostensibly for young adults, these books are excellent for adults. Sutcliff successfully brings the struggle between Rome and the barbarians to life, covering the back-and-forth battle under changing circumstances and across the centuries. Through this, her concern with how her youthful main characters address the first difficult times of their lives links the books together. Their availability varies, but these novels are well worth the effort to track down. The strategic and tactical concerns of each successive defender of civilized Britain, as he struggles to hold back the dark, gives the series an epic sweep that makes the books hard to put down. Dive into any of these books for a first-rate historical recreation, with living, breathing characters who will leave you as passionately wedded to the defense of Britain as they are.

Source: Rosemary Sutcliff | Roman Britain historical novels | The Green Man Review

Michael Rosen drank in Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic The Eagle of the Ninth in two ways

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth Original UK Book Cover 1954 Michael Rosen (writer – for children mostly – poet, performer, broadcaster and university professor) commented last year in The Guardian newspaper about Rosemary Sutcliff and her classic historical novel for children and young people The Eagle of the Ninth:

Interesting that she was writing about the end of an empire at the end of …an empire. And does the search for the lost legion echo/refract (Joseph) Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?

Some of us drank in The Eagle of the Ninth two ways: once as a BBC Children’s Hour serial and second time as the book. I can remember hurrying to get home to hear it – moody, dangerous, mysterious – a quest for something real but long gone, a possible solution to an unsolved story…and somehow it had something to do with events that happened a long time ago just where you walked when we were on holiday: on moors, or on wet fields where we were camping. The book made a connection for me between a past and that particular present.

Source: Guardian newspaper editorial ‘In praise of’ Rosemary Sutcliff

There are no good books which are only for children

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff often said that she ‘wrote books for children aged 8 to 88’.

… W.H. Auden wrote that ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children’. In this sense, it is natural for children’s books to become adult books if they are any good; since all adults have been children, books for and about children are always potentially for and about adults too. (Hugh Haughton)

Via: presenting… books!.

Judging Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic of children’s literature and historical fiction The Eagle of the Ninth on two levels

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

David Urbach has pointed me to a blogger’s 10/10 review of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s most famous book ought to be looked at in two different ways, and judged on two levels. Firstly, any reader venturing into historical fiction will be instantly drawn to it as a deserving classic. Every word of praise afforded The Eagle of the Ninth is surely deserved, and every criticism should be scrutinised heavily. This book is not only a simple story; it is a revelation. It is a sudden meeting between the children’s and young adults’ fiction of the ’80s and ’90s, when children’s literature began to be taken seriously; and literature from the early twentieth century and the nineteenth century, when writers felt able to wax philosophic and lyrical, and were not so concerned with spending a hundred pages on diligently establishing a scene and building meticulously to a grand climax or a cheap twist.
Source: The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff  | Library of Libation