If any who read this blog share a concern from family experience about tackling bowel cancer, and are moved to make a donation, I note that my daughter Rowan Rosemary Lawton, named in honour of Rosemary Sutcliff, is running to raise funds for the UK Charity Beating Bowel Cancer. See here.
Historian, writer and journalist Christina Hardyment judged Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff to be an ‘odd one out’.
Rosemary Sutcliff is most famed for The Eagle of the Ninth, but there was much more to her than that. In the 1950s, historically-minded children found her books a magic carpet into the past. I began with Brother Dusty-feet (1952) and The Armourer’s House (1951), and never looked back and an insatiable interest in history has remained the backbone of my life.
In 1954, The Eagle of the Ninth introduced Marcus Flavius Aquila, a young Roman who chooses to stay in Britain after the legions leave. Seven subsequent books follow his family’s fate, usually directly. The odd book out is the fifth, Sword at Sunset, now published in a new edition to celebrate its 50th birthday. In 1963, it was firmly announced to be for adults, and given the (for their time) graphic and violent scenes of sex and slaughter, it deserved to be.
Endeavour Press have now republished in E form Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical fiction novel The Flowers of Adonis, about Alkibiades, who The Times in an interview to mark its publication in 1969 called “one of the most enigmatic figures in Greek History”. It is a novel of the Peloponnesian War, and Alkibiades’s relationship with Athens, and the dreadful battle at Syracuse.
Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a monograph about Rudyard Kipling, who was a major influence on her approach to writing stories for children and young adults, and historical novels. From the introduction:
My schooling began late, owing to a childhood illness, and ended when I was only fourteen, owing to my entire lack of interest in being educated. But I showed signs of being able to paint, and so from school I went to art school, trained hard, and eventually became a professional miniature painter. I did not start to write until the end of the War, but now I have switched completely from one medium to the other, and it is several years since I last touched paint.’
Of the Kipling book she said, ‘My reason for writing this monograph will be obvious to anyone who reads it: I have loved Kipling for as long as I can remember.
When Geoffrey Trease began writing historical fiction for children, it was a minor and despised field, treasured not for any literary merit but because it helped to nurture the children of Britain.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 