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.
An early unpublished book was called Wild Sunrise. It was about the Roman invasion of Britain told from the British viewpoint. The hero was Cradoc, a name Rosemary used later in The Eagle of the Ninth and in Sun Horse, Moon Horse. (Her father, who I knew as Uncle George, had a naval hero called Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, who went down with his flagship at the battle of Coronel in 1914). Wild Sunrise disappeared, which was as well, she said in her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (1983), ‘because so much of me was in it, naked and defenceless’
Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Article on Rosemary by Gilian Avery
In the summer of 2007 The Hitchcock Blonde was re-reading her ” favourite childhood authors: Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Ursula LeGuin. Along with Wolf Brother, they share certain themes: the buildungsroman grail quest, the primacy of animals and nature, the value of a sharply sensed moment in a great sweep of time and place. They are properly epic, humbling and exhilerating.
But above all, these tales are rolled out in a cool, deep river of action. There is so little self-indulgence, because kids are the most exacting, most selfish readers. They have no time for a book written to please anyone but themselves, certainly not an author or a critic. Awkwardness is too familiar and raw a feeling at that age to want to grapple with it in books. Pain, yes, ambiguity, yes, but not wanking about with words.
I am starting to collect references by writers to the influence Rosemary Sutcliff had on them, or at least to the fact that they read her. All references very welcome, please! Thus Karen Cushman read young adult historical novels by such authors as Rosemary Sutcliffe (sic; it should be Rosemary Sutcliff) and Patricia Mac-Lachlan, admiring their “simple and polished prose.” (Source: Publishers Weeklyvol 24 (4 July) 1994). Her 1995 novel The Midwife’s Apprentice won the Newbery Medal for children’s literature
An early unpublished book was called Wild Sunrise. It was about the Roman invasion of Britain told from the British viewpoint. The hero was Cradoc, a name Rosemary used later in The Eagle of the Ninth and in Sun Horse, Moon Horse. (Her father, who I knew as Uncle George, had a naval hero called Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, who went down with his flagship at the battle of Coronel in 1914). Wild Sunrise disappeared, which was as well, she said in her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (1983), ‘because so much of me was in it, naked and defenceless’
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 