For award-winning, internationally-acclaimed author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). By Anthony Lawton: godson, cousin & literary executor. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical fiction, children's literature and books, films, TV & radio, including The Eagle of the Ninth, Sword at Sunset, Song for a Dark Queen, The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, Dawn Wind, Blue Remembered Hills.
Category: General
Trawling the internet, researching libraries and databases, and occasionally from material sent to me, I discover things I did not know much about, or indeed at all! There can be more than one Discovery of the Day.
Christmas preparations and celebrations are upon us. I am reminded of a post by my son last year:
Before Rosemary Sutcliff became I writer, she was an artist. She made beautiful miniatures. One of her set of miniatures is a stunning nativity scene. As Rosemary was my dad’s Godmother and cousin, we inherited some of her possessions when she died in 1992. The nativity scene was one of those possessions and every Christmas we put it out next to the christmas tree in the front hall of our family home in Leicester. Here are some photographs my wife took … of this beautiful piece of art.
Rosemary Sutcliff was on Desert Island Discs on the BBC with Roy Plomley in 1983, before she had written all her 50+ books. I am hoping that eventually the BBC will post the recording itself. Then you would hear her and her reasons for her choice of eight pieces of music to take to her desert island shipwreck.
The books listed here share the essential virtues of all good fiction: the renewal of our sense of the world, of ourselves, of language, the extension of ourselves across time and space. And how odd it would be, how dull, if novelists and readers confined themselves, in the name of some dubious notion of relevance, to the events and style of one particular period.”
Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
As a boy, Rosemary Sutcliff was my favourite author and this, the story of a young Roman centurion caught up in the search for the lost eagle of the Ninth Legion, my favourite of her novels. I had not heard of her or of the novel in many years, but Eagle of the Ninth has just been made into a film. It would be nice to think that a new generation of young readers will discover the pleasures of Sutcliff’s writing. Librarians of the nation (those who are still left) stand by your desks!
Rosemary Sutcliff lived some of her childhood in North Devon. Her old house – for I think this is it – is now, I find, a North Devon bed and breakfast venue.
From another post at You Write (see tab above) I learn that M E Foley’s sixth-grade teacher:
brought back from Ireland a complete set of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books, even though I’m sure they were already available in the US. Maybe she felt books printed in Ireland were more valuable than local copies, but the domestic version I got from the library and read over and over had quite an impact. On my first trip to England—my honeymoon—the one thing I absolutely had to see was Hadrian’s Wall.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 