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Tag: historical fiction
Jamie Jauncey cries over ‘wise and humane’ Rosemary Sutcliff, in India
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
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.
Writing with 19th century cadences but packing a 21st century punch
Returning to a full collection of Google alerts about “Rosemary Sutcliff” I noticed an interesting article in The New York Times which makes reference to Rosemary. Anne Foreman, the author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire,
wrote:
Once upon a time, Henry Treece, Roger Lancelyn Green, Rosemary Sutcliff and Elizabeth George Speare — all authors of historical novels for children — were household names. The genre was so vibrant that writers like Joan Aiken and Susan Cooper could veer into “alternate history” sagas, confident their young readers would have sufficient knowledge to appreciate the subtle interplay of historical “fact” and historical “fiction.”
Then came the downgrading of history from a discipline in its own right to a subset of something vaguer called the humanities. Read More »
Review of The Flower of Adonis | Historical novel for adults by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Times
Rosemary Sutcliff‘s The Flower of Adonis reviewed in The Times of London in 1969 (before it was behind an electronic paywall!).Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 