The Eagle film was much covered in earlier years on this blog. It was shown again in the UK on Film 4. Posts here. Last night I was moved to tweet about it too at www.twitter.com/rsutcliff
When the BBC adapted and broadcast Rosemary Sutcliff‘s historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth in 1977, the BBC Radio Times wrote about her approach to children, writing, the Romans and her hero Marcus—’part of me was in love with him’.
Her passion for the Romans stemmed from her childhood. Her mother read aloud to her from books like Rudyard Kipling‘s Puck Of Pook’s Hill. His three Roman tales entranced her.
I didn’t read myself till the last possible minute, about nine. I was brought up on Arthur Weigall’s Wanderings In Roman Britain and Wanderings In Anglo-Saxon Britain. He mentions this eagle dug up at Silchester and I’ve been fascinated by it since I was five.
The Radio Times journalist wrote of Rosemary: “She writes, superbly, of adventure, battle, young warriors. Rosemary Sutcliff‘s conversation is rapid and merry and very funny”.
In the BBC TV publicity material she claimed to be completely uneducated.
I left school at fourteen. I haven’t got a very literary or intelligent kind of life. I have very ordinary friends.
In fact, she completed art school and was a successful professional miniaturist in her late twenties when she turned to writing and secured the publication of her first book. It just “happened to be” for children; and most of her books kept on being, theoretically at least, “for children”. But she definitely did not believe in a rigid division between adults’ and children’s books. “When I was a child I was reading Dickens and Beatrix Potter at the same time”. As far as writing goes she did not find it restrictive.
Very occasionally a subject is verboten. And one may have to simplify—no, not that—uncomplicate a very complex emotion. But usually I just write as I want to write.
She said that she did not know all that many children and did not automatically like them .
I like a child or a dog or an adult according to their merits. I am prone to like more dogs on a percentage basis.
The Eagle Of The Ninth, published in 1954, was one of her favourite books.
I rather wish it weren’t, because it is quite early. I think and hope I have written better since. But it is my best beloved. Part of me was Marcus, and part was in love with him.
When aged only about three she had juvenile arthritis (Still’s Disease) which was another factor in her writing:
I think most children’s writers are writing a chunk of unlived childhood.
Source: Radio Times, September 3, 1977
For 2016 so far the countries that viewers of pages of this blog have come from are:
Sally Hawkins, who writes for the Sunday Times, was asked to choose a ‘special book’ that changed her life, and explain why it means so much to her.
When I was eight, my taste suddenly moved on from What Katy Did at School and Swallows and Amazons to history. History with boys in it. The Eagle of the Ninth wasn’t the first historical novel I read, but it is one I found myself caught up in all over again, when the film version appeared in 2011. Fifty years on, I found its you-were-there depiction of Roman Britain and gripping plot as beguiling as ever.
I now realise I can trace my academic choices back to this tale of a young man searching for a lost legion — and missing father. Rosemary Sutcliff based it on authentic sources, and this intrigued me. The novel fired my interest in history; it was lurking behind my teenage passion for the First World War poets; and, from there, it was just a short step to my signing up for postgraduate degrees in medieval literature.
Re-reading Sutcliff, I realise just how un-condescending to younger readers her style and vocabulary are: what they don’t understand will just have to be looked up in a dictionary or on the internet. But the story is so compellingly told, they won’t be put off. More important, the book taught the younger me about friendship, courage and integrity. Sutcliff’s heroes are models of how to be good people, but never priggish or unbelievable. I bet George R R Martin read this book before embarking on his Game of Thrones series. The Wall for him is as potent a symbol of the divide between civilisation and darkness as it is for Sutcliff’s young Roman officer.
Rosemary Sutcliff talks about herself and her writing—the only recorded interview with her that I have heard— in an interview on BBC Radio with Roy Plomley for an edition of the long-running, classic radio programme Desert Island Discs, also in 1983. Roy Plomley had presumably read her memoir.
When anybody asks me where I was born, or when I am called on to provide that information in filling out a form, I admit with a distinct sense of apology that I was born in Surrey.
(Blue Remembered Hills, opening sentence)
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 