Category: The Eagle of the Ninth

Jamie Jauncey cries over ‘wise and humane’ Rosemary Sutcliff, in India

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Yesterday evening I raised my glass to Rosemary Sutcliff. It was an odd moment. I was sitting on my own in the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Gurgaon (just outside New Delhi, India), overlooking what my driver had proudly told me earlier in the week is the largest road toll in Asia (Ay-zee-a, he pronounced it), sixteen lanes of winking red tail lights, sixteen lanes of unblinking white headlights; and she had made me cry.

Read the full, lovely post and other writing at Jamie Jauncey’s  blog A Few Kind Words. Or read it here (reproduced with permission)…..Read More »

Rereading Rosemary Sutcliff | The Guardian

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The Guardian newspaper continues to enthuse about Rosemary Sutcliff and her writing for children and adults.

Rereading: Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth | Books | The Guardian.

Did The Eagle of the Ninth historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff want to be a romantic novelist?

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff‘s life and work in children’s, young adult, and adult literature, including The Eagle of the Ninth, was commented upon in 2003 by one of her editors on a website which I cannot now find (and I posted this first in April last year, 2010). She did have a “mystical communion with the past”, an “uncanny sense of place” and a rude sense of humour. But she certainly did not aspire to being a romantic novelist with books “full of sex”. Nor did she feel she had been “let down” by being “crippled by Stills disease”. And her best work was not only in the first half of her career; she had award-winning books up to the end of her life.

She wrote fine books after the 1950s and 1960s, for example the award-winning Song for a Dark Queen in the 1970s, The Shining Company in the 1980s (which won The USA’s Phoenix Award in 2010), and even her last manuscript Sword Song which was published after her death in the 1990s.Read More »

Lindsey Davis’s Top Ten Roman books includes The Eagle of the Ninth | The Guardian

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff was in Lindsey Davis’s top ten Roman books in The Guardian in February 2009. Davis has written the Falco Roman detective novels.

“Somewhere about the year 117AD, the Ninth Legion, which was stationed at Eboracum, where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again.” Hooked? If not, there’s no hope for you. A wonderful novel, for children of all ages.

The full list of books was:

  1. Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jérôme Carcopino
  2. Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins
  3. Rome and Her Empire by Barry Cunliffe
  4. Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide by Amanda Claridge
  5. The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
  6. Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe
  7. The Lost World of Pompeii by Colin Amery and Brian Curran Jr
  8. Roman Britain by Keith Branigan.
  9. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
  10. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Rosemary Sutcliff won The Carnegie Medal for historical novel The Lantern Bearers in 1959

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Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, and The Lantern Bearers are sometimes called a trilogy. Rosemary Sutcliff won the Library Association Carnegie Medal for The Lantern Bearers in 1959. The Medal is awarded every year in the UK to the writer of an outstanding book for children. The Library Association started the prize in 1936, in memory of the Scottish-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), a self-made industrialist who made his fortune in steel in the USA. His experience of using a library as a child led him to resolve that “if ever wealth came to me that it should be used to establish free libraries”. He established more than 2800 libraries across the English speaking world and, by the time of his death, over half the library authorities in Great Britain had Carnegie libraries.

First awarded to Arthur Ransome for Pigeon Post, the medal is now awarded by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. The winner receives a golden medal and some £500 worth of books to donate to a library of their choice. Rosemary Sutcliff also: