Rosemary Sutcliff, was provided by the time when the Roman Empire was crumbling at the edges with (says critic and children’s book expert Brian Alderson):
a complex of subjects of great dramatic potential: civilising discipline set against tribal barbarities, the servants of Empire with an allegiance also to a homeland within its borders, the selfless devotion, on either side of the equation, to causes and to overarching human relationships (and even those between man and beast) … Read More »
Rosemary Sutcliff – historical novelist and children’s book writer – is the object of an essay by John Rowe Townsend in his 1971 book A Sense of Story —as blog reader and commenter Anne highlights at another post. She notes that his observation that Rosemary Sutcliff’s books amount to “a body of work rather than a shelf of novels” is is taken from what she refers to as the essay’s “wonderfully striking and poetic introduction”:
Day to day, minute to minute, second to second the surface of our lives is in a perpetual ripple of change. Below the immediate surface are slower, deeper currents, and below these again are profound mysterious movements beyond the scale of the individual life-span. And far down on the sea-bed are the oldest, most lasting things, whose changes our imagination can hardly grasp at all. The strength of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main work—and it is a body of work rather than a shelf of novels—is its sense of movement on all these scales. Bright the surface may be, and vigorous the action of the moment, but it is never detached from the forces underneath that give it meaning. She puts more into the reader’s consciousness than he is immediately aware of.
Source: Edmonton Journal – Nov 15, 1963
Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff is recommended by Julia Eccleshare, children’s books editor of the Guardian newspaper, as one of her Top Ten Children’s Books in Babyccino Kids, ‘an international lifestyle website for modern mums’:
… true burning Warrior Scarlet … was the very colour of courage itself. No woman might wear the colour, nor might the Half People who came and went at the Tribe’s call. It was for the Men’s side.
Warrior Scarlet, published in 1957, is indeed a wonderful historical novel, illustrated by Charles Keeping. Of the story, Julia Eccleshare writes:
Rosemary Sutcliff had an exceptional ability to bring the past to life; in Warrior Scarlet it is the Bronze Age. Drem needs to kill a wolf to become a man of the tribe. How he first fails and then succeeds in doing so despite his withered arm is a moving story about overcoming adversity.
Julia Eccleshare compiled 1001 Children’s Books: You Must Read Before You Grow Up,
Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels and children’s books were highlighted by Alan Myers who compiled an A to Z of the many writers who had a significant connection with the North-East of England. By 2008 (when I first posted this) I thought it had disappeared from the web but no, it is here.
One of the most distinguished children’s writers of our times, (some of ) Rosemary Sutcliff’s … books … (are now) considered classics. She sets several of her best-known works in Roman and Dark Age Britain, giving her the opportunity to write about divided loyalties, a recurring theme. The Capricorn Bracelet comprises six linked short stories spanning the years AD 61 to AD 383, and Hadrian’s Wall features in the narrative.
The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) is perhaps her finest work and exemplifies the psychological dilemmas that Rosemary Sutcliff brought to her novels. Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 