For award-winning, internationally-acclaimed author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). By Anthony Lawton: godson, cousin & literary executor. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical fiction, children's literature and books, films, TV & radio, including The Eagle of the Ninth, Sword at Sunset, Song for a Dark Queen, The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, Dawn Wind, Blue Remembered Hills.
Rosemary Sutcliff, author of the children’s book and historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth, set in Roman Britain, told me more than once that she believed in re-incarnation and that she had lived in Roman times. Hence, she believed, her feel for that period. So – as I have posted before – I was struck by Barendina Smedley’s words in her blog Fugitive Ink on reading The Eagle of the Ninth for the first time as an adult not a child:
It really does feel as if the world in which she set her characters was, in some sense, as real to her as the characters themselves … Read More »
The Eagle of the Ninth (now a 2010 film) is ‘perhaps’ Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘finest book of historical fiction’ claims Alan Myers, and she is ‘one of the most distinguished children’s writers of our times’. The Eagle of the Ninth ‘exemplifies the psychological dilemmas that Rosemary Sutcliff brought to her novels’.
Rosemary Sutcliff said about the historical accuracy of her children’s book Simon written early in her career in 1953, set in the English Civil War of the 17th century:
“Most history books deal with the final campaign of the civil war in a single paragraph, and the Battle of Torrington they seldom mention at all. In this story I have tried to show what that final campaign in the west was like, and to re-fight the battles fought over my own countryside. Most of the people I’ve written about really lived; Torrington Church really did blow up, with 200 Royalist prisoners and their Parliamentary Guard inside, and no one has ever known how it happened, though Chaplain Joshua Sprigg left it on record that the deed was done by ‘one Watts, a desperate villain’ “.
“The themes of my children’s books are mostly quite adult, and in fact the difference between writing for children and for adults is, to me at any rate, only a quite small gear change.”
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 
