Sad day today December 8th, my birthday, for until 1992 I always spoke with Rosemary Sutcliff: my good fortune and privilege was that she was my godmother (and indeed my first cousin once removed). Her own birthday is coming this week. It is Dec 14th.
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth No 27 in Times newpaper Top 50 reads for children
The Times newspaper published in mid-2013 a list of the top 50 ‘books that all children should read’, which included Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (at 27). Of course all such lists reflect the preferred reading of the selection panel and it is good, indeed essential, to know who was on the panel. In this case it was: Amanda Craig (then Times children’s books critic), Lucy Coats (author), Wendy Cooling (founder of Bookstart), Tom Gatti (Times Saturday Review editor), Katherine Langrish (blogger and author), Anthony McGowan (author), and Nicholas Tucker (children’s literature specialist). Their list:
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
- The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
- The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
- The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer
- Just William by Richmal Crompton
- Matilda by Roald Dahl
- The Midnight Folk by John Masefield
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
- Stories for Children by Oscar Wilde
- Hellbent by Anthony McGowan
- The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban
- Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
- The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones
- The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr
- The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White
- The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
- The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss
- How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
- The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
- One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson
- The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
- The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate by Margaret Mahy
- Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz
- How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell
- Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin
- The Borrowers by Mary Norton
- The Snow-walker’s Son by Catherine Fisher
- Holes by Louis Sachar
- Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
- Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond
- Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver
- Vice Versa by F. Anstey
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd
Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel about Alkibiades | The Flowers of Adonis
In the introduction to her historical novel The Flowers of Adonis, Rosemary Sutcliff wrote:
I have provided a possible explanation for Antiochus’s insane foolhardiness when left in command of the Athenian Fleet, because Thucidides’s bald account is so unbelievable (unless one assumes that both Antiochus and Alkibiades were mentally defective) that any explanation seems more likely than none.
Alkibiades himself is an enigma. Even allowing that no man is all black and all white, few men can ever have been more wildly and magnificently piebald. Like another strange and contradictory character Sir Walter Raleigh, he casts a glamour that comes clean down the centuries, a dazzle of personal magnetism that makes it hard to see the man behind it. I have tried to see. I have tried to fit the pieces into a coherent whole; I don’t know whether I have been successful or not; but I do not think that I have anywhere falsified the portrait.
For those parents out there who want their children to move on from J K Rowling
Robin Rowland used to write a blog about his writing life (he was a TV journalist) called The Garret Tree. Some eight years ago he posted “When I waited for Rosemary Sutcliff”.
When I was a kid, Rosemary Sutcliff was my J. K. Rowling. In the early 1960s, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the next Sutcliff. I lived in northern British Columbia and the waiting involved finding out when the book would arrive in the public library. In Kitimat, British Columbia, a town carved out of the bush, there were no bookstores. The local variety store and the stationary store both carried popular paperbacks delivered at the same time as magazines.For me, Rosemary Sutcliff created a world just as magic as Rowling’s. Somewhat like Hogwarts and Harry it was an alternative British universe. Many of her books followed one scattered family for a millennium or more, through the history of Britain from the ancient Celts through the Roman conquest and occupation, the collapse of the empire, the Saxon invasion and into the Middle Ages. It was both familiar (especially since my parents were British) and Read More »
John Bell (d. 2008) was Rosemary Sutcliff’s first editor at OUP
Born in Hull in 19222, John Bell – one time editor at OUP, who died aged 85 in 2008 – was instrumental in helping the career of Rosemary Sutcliff, as he was for leading post-war children’s authors such as William Mayne, Philippa Pearce and Rosemary Sutcliff.
He went to Oxford University, but while he was still an undergraduate World War II started. After the war ended, he returned to Oxford and graduated in 1948. He joined the children’s book team at Oxford University Press, based in London, and was responsible for Rosemary Sutcliff’s early books.
In 1956, he transferred to the publisher’s literary team. In the mid-80s, when he retired he set up a press of his own at his home cottage at Wootton-by-Woodstock – the Backwater Press . He published several little items from or for Rosemary Sutcliff.
Sources: Yorkshire Post, February 23, 2008; The Times (London), February 18, 2008.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 