A Rosemary Sutcliff Style Guide?

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff was my personal ‘style guide’ when she was alive. (She would have been 90 years old last week). I remember her berating me frequently for a far too ready use of commas, let alone for contorted sentences like this …

For many years since her death in 1992  I have used The Guardian Style Guide. I started to read it today at ‘A’, thinking about entries that might have overlapped with a Rosemary Sutcliff Style Guide. Thus, extracted from many entries under the letter ‘A’ in the Guardian guide:

  • abbeys are, like cathedrals, with capitals: Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, etc
  • abscess
  • achilles heel
  • AD, BC: AD goes before the date (AD64), BC goes after (300BC); both go after the century, eg second century AD, fourth century BC
  • adviser not advisor
  • affect/effect: exhortations in the style guide had no effect (noun) on the number of mistakes; the level of mistakes was not affected (verb) by exhortations in the style guide; we hope to effect (verb) a change in this
  • aide-de-camp , plural aides-de-camp (aide is a noun)
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Rosemary Sutcliff and the South Downs

domcoyoteLeave a comment

Award winning children’s novelist Rosemary Sutcliff lived most of her life in Sussex. Some of her stories are set in the county and mention the South Downs, a large protected area of Sussex countryside. I discovered that she is in the ‘featured writers’ section of www.southdownsonline.org, along with H.G Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf.

For much of her adult life she lived in Walberton. The remains of Iron Age forts, Roman villas and Norman castles in the county inspired her to set many of her stories in Sussex.

Warrior Scarlet is set in the Iron Age. Some of the action takes place near Cissbury Ring. At one point, the hero, Drem, fails his test to become a warrior and is sent off to be a shepherd. Sheep on the Downs were looked after in a very similar way until about 100 years or so ago. The South Downs Society paid for the restoration of a traditional wheeled shepherd’s hut in 1980 and for a shepherd’s room in 1989, both at the Weald and Downland Museum.

In The Witch’s Brat the hero is thrown out of his tribe and walks along the South Downs to Winchester. Here he finds shelter in the New Minster, better known as Winchester Cathedral. He ends up in London where he helps with the setting up of St. Bartholomew’s hospital.

Rosemary Sutcliff Spelling Watch continues!

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

I am still trying at every opportunity to nudge people who mis-spell Rosemary Sutcliff (sic) with an E as Sutcliffe (wrong!) to get it right and put it right. Hence today on Twitter:

And hence also I have been in touch today with the producer of the new The Eagle film to alert the film financiers Focus Features that they too have got it wrong on this page about the film!

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman Britain

domcoyoteLeave a comment

Classic children’s historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff was inspired to write many books set in Roman Britain, including The Eagle of the Ninth, now a major motion picture (or film in UK English!).

I found this great old map of Roman Britain on Wikipedia, which includes the names of British tribes, Roman towns and the Routes of Caesar’s expeditions from 55 to 54 BC.

Source: Wikipedia on Roman Britain

Not the Colosseum

domcoyote2 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff fan Robert Vermaat alerted me to a very obvious mistake in my last post. I wrote that the character Esca from ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ was fighting in the colosseum. Anyone who has read the book would realise of course that it is not the Colosseum but the local amphitheatre in Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester Roman town), a much smaller building than the enormous Colosseum in Rome!

Colosseum in Rome
Remains of amphitheatre in Calleva Atrebatum