The Eagle of the Ninth (now a 2010 film) is ‘perhaps’ Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘finest book of historical fiction’ claims Alan Myers, and she is ‘one of the most distinguished children’s writers of our times’. The Eagle of the Ninth ‘exemplifies the psychological dilemmas that Rosemary Sutcliff brought to her novels’.
Sword at Sunset, a historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, was reviewed in 1987 by a reader who described himself as a ‘recovering chemical engineer’:
“… Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset stands out for its raw emotion and storyline stripped down to the essentials … This novel makes other versions, no matter how much fantasy and magic are injected, pallid by comparison. Other authors have recreated a gritty, realistic Arthur since Sutcliff introduced the idea more than forty years ago, but this first attempt at that take on the Arthurian legend still stands out as the best”.
(Eric Eller in Greenman Review)
This from the US Boy Scouts magazine Boys’ Life in January 1985 (page 19).
Mind you, there were competing demands on a boy scout’s time!
(Permission to reproduce being sought; first posted March 2, 2010 … still no answer!))
Rosemary Sutcliff, writer of children’s fiction, is named by C.C. Humphreys, author of Vlad: The Last Confession, and several historical novels, as his favourite author. Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia about his favourite books, he listed the classic historical novel Warrior Scarlet and said:Read More »
“The themes of my children’s books are mostly quite adult, and in fact the difference between writing for children and for adults is, to me at any rate, only a quite small gear change.”
Source: Townsend, John Rowe. 1971. A Sense of Story. London: Longman p. 201
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 