Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote (quoted in the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature):
“there’s a great loneliness about having any kind of handicap in a world which in general doesn’t, however much you get to the stage where neither you nor anybody else notices. You tend to create somebody on your side of the barrier who will talk your own language.”
(I have blogged an article she wrote about disability before)
Led there by the excellent appreciative but disappeared bluerememberedhills.blogspot.com I found this posted in 2003 to an ancient history website (which I also cannot find now) about Rosemary Sutcliff.
I knew Rosemary as a friend and, briefly, as her editor…most of her best writing was done in the 50s and 60s, beginning with The Eagle of the Ninth and ending with The Mark of the Horse Lord, which is my own favourite. What she really wanted to do, however, was to write romantic novels full of sex, but here her experience, and imagination, let her down. She was crippled by Still’s disease, contracted as a child – She had no movement in her legs, and hands whose work (including writing and miniature painting) was done with just a forefinger and a tiny, rudimentary thumb.Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 