Tag: children’s literature

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Bearers | Folio Society edition a Christmas present for friends or family?

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The Folio Society’s beautiful version of Rosemary Sutcliff’s award-winning historical novel The Lantern Bearers is the latest of  their wonderful reproductions of Rosemary Sutcliff novels. Perhaps a fitting present for someone this Christmas – it can be ordered online?

Winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 1957, The Lantern Bearers is, in some people’s eyes, the best and  most thoughtful of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles. Penelope Lively’s, who knew Rosemary well, and spoke at the memorial service we organised for her way back in 1992, has written a special new introduction. She comments:

It is a work of her maturity, one in which she had already honed all her signature skills – her power of narrative, of pace, her way with characters, the rich evocations of a Britain that is gone but that she had recreated. It is full of the creamy surf of meadowsweet alongside crimson cloaks flying in the wind …

This edition is illustrated by the award-winning Russian artist, Roman Pisarev.

Source: The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Folio Society.

Arthurian writer and history novelist Rosemary Sutcliff is a spellbinder

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Rosemary Sutcliff is a spellbinder. While we read, we believe everything she says. She has hammered out a style that rises and falls like the waves of the sea.

Comment of a US reviewer in 1963, the year that best-seller The Sword at Sunset was published.

Source: Robert Payne in New York Review, May 26, 1963.

Another Pile of Books includes Rosemary Sutcliff | Song for a Dark Queen

Anthony Lawton9 Comments

First, chronologically speaking, in my big pile of Roman-setting (Rosemary) Sutcliffs : the tragic, doomed story of Boudicca (Song for A Dark Queen).   I’d read this before several times, but I re-read it recently.   It’s very dark, especially for a children’s book – she doesn’t pull her punches, everything in Cassius Dio’s not-really-very-contemporary-but-best-we’ve-got account is there: the rapes, the casual violence of the Romans, the torture and sacrifice of Roman women by Boudicca’s forces.

Boudicca is horrifying in this, but the writing is fabulous, and for me, it really works.  Even though Boudicca ends up doing horrifying things, I felt that I ended up caring for the character and feeling a sort of understanding for her.

via bunn – Another Pile of Books.

Jamie Jauncey cries over ‘wise and humane’ Rosemary Sutcliff, in India

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Yesterday evening I raised my glass to Rosemary Sutcliff. It was an odd moment. I was sitting on my own in the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Gurgaon (just outside New Delhi, India), overlooking what my driver had proudly told me earlier in the week is the largest road toll in Asia (Ay-zee-a, he pronounced it), sixteen lanes of winking red tail lights, sixteen lanes of unblinking white headlights; and she had made me cry.

Read the full, lovely post and other writing at Jamie Jauncey’s  blog A Few Kind Words. Or read it here (reproduced with permission)…..Read More »

Revisiting Rosemary Sutcliff, a remarkable woman

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

The flurry of attention to The Carnegie Medal has set me re-reading all manner of more extensive pieces on Rosemary Sutcliff’s writing. One such was posted at the extensive historicalnovels.info site whose writer ‘Annis”  decided some while back to revisit Rosemary Sutcliff’s  “work as an adult and consider what it was about this remarkable woman that enabled her to inspire so many children with an enduring love of history, heroic fantasy, mythology and legend.”.

Ask any baby-boomer who loves historical fiction what inspired their appreciation, and chances are the reply will be, “Well, when I was a kid I read Rosemary Sutcliff’s books”. Out of print for years, Sutcliff’s novels are making a comeback as their original readers reach an age when they can influence the reissue of old favourites.