Rosemary Sutcliff on writing Sword at Sunset in the first person

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Press cuttings about Historical novel Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff once said about writing her Arthurian novel  Sword at Sunset – a bestseller in 1963:

… after I had finished the story I had great difficulty getting back into a woman’s skin, because I had been living as a man for eighteen months, thinking as a man, making love as a man, always looking from a man’s viewpoint. I am always deeply involved in my books. For me the book doesn’t work if I am not. But I have never been as deeply involved as that before or since.

When I started writing Sword at Sunset I made at least three false starts, but I couldn’t think what was the matter. I knew exactly what the story was that I wanted to tell, but it wouldn’t come. Then suddenly the penny dropped: it had to be first-person singular. I had never done first-person singular before, but the moment I started doing it that way it came, like a bird. But I had problems with it: first-person singular is very different from third-person writing, and I had no experience of it at all. But it was the only way it could be written.

The history of the IXth or VIIIIth (Ninth) Legion and background to Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth | A reading list

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Cover to Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth Original UK edition 1954Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth is rooted in  the history of a real Roman legion. A couple of years back I noted some references about the history from a website that has now disappeared – by one Ross Cowan. He had written that

… to learn more, especially about the evidence for the legion in the period c. AD 118-161, see :

Birley, A. R. The Roman Government of Britain. Oxford: 2005, 228-229.

Birley, E. B. ‘The Fate of the Ninth Legion’ in R. M. Butler (ed.) Soldier and Civilian in Roman Yorkshire. Leicester: 1971, 71-80.

Campbell, D. B. Roman Legionary Fortresses, 27 BC – AD 378. Oxford: 2006, 27-29.

Cowan, R. For the Glory of Rome: A History of Warriors and Warfare. London: 2007, 220-234 and 271-273. Read More »

I will choose a good story over absolute historical accuracy | Rosemary Sutcliff on writing historical fiction

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Since I am a writer, not an historian, I will sacrifice historical accuracy. I really very seldom have to do it, and then it is only a matter of perhaps reversing the order of two events, or something like that. But if it does come to the crunch, I will choose a good story over absolute historical accuracy.

Source: Interview with Rosemary Sutcliff  by Raymond H Thompson (here, on this blog)


Storytelling by Rosemary Sutcliff was ‘A dialogue of the imagination’ with ‘one of the minstrel kind’

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Margaret Meek, who wrote a significant monograph about Rosemary Sutcliff in the 1960s  early in RS’s career, wrote about her again in 1990 on the publication of The Shining Company:

The sharing of storytelling that writers do with readers is the dialogue of imagination. Rosemary Sutcliff lives, grows and acts and suffers in her stories. The worlds created in her imagination have had to stand in for the world of much everyday actuality. From her therefore we can learn what the imagination does, and how it allows us all to explore what’s possible, the realm of virtual experience. In Rosemary Sutcliff‘s world, heroes, heroines and readers alike walk a head taller than usual, as heroic warriors, to confront, like Drem in Warrior Scarlet, fearsome events as rites of passage and thus discover what is worth striving for.

Readers have to expect to be spellbound in the tradition of storytelling that’s much older than reading and writing, when before the days of written records bards and minstrels were entrusted with the memory of a tribe. Rosemary Sutcliff is in this tradition; she says of herself that she’s `of the minstrel kind’. This in itself sets her apart from some of the more, apparently, throwaway casualness of some contemporary writing. In these days, when we’ve learned to look closely at the constructedness of narratives, she will still say that she knows when a story is `in’ her and `waiting to be told’.

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Source: Issue 64 of Books for Keeps