Tag: young adult fiction

Writing with 19th century cadences but packing a 21st century punch

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

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 »

Rosemary Sutcliff was of the minstrel kind

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff was the subject of a fascinating article entitled ‘Of The Minstrel Kind’ in the excellent  Books for Keeps – the children’s book magazine. Margaret Meek was paying tribute to Rosemary as she reached seventy. I was reminded of it when I read The Guardian editorial in praise of Rosemary the other day.

I met Rosemary Sutcliff for the first time thirty years ago in a London hospital where she was recovering from an operation. She was already famous; The Eagle of the Ninth had seen to that. Published in 1954 it had been reprinted four times. It’s probably still the book by which she is best known: an historical novel about the Romans in Britain, the first of a group of stories including The Lantern Bearers which won for her the Carnegie Medal.

Although I was nervous at that first encounter I was much more worried about seeming impertinent. I’d agreed to write about the novels for a Bodley Head Monograph, one of a series of essays about well-known writers for children, to which Rosemary Sutcliff had already contributed a fine example about Rudyard Kipling. It wasn’t so easy in those days to be curious about a famous author, especially one who had had a long childhood illness, who went to school for the first time at nine and learned to read even later, and who finished her compulsory education ‘mercifully early’ at fourteen. Read More »

Did The Eagle of the Ninth historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff want to be a romantic novelist?

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff‘s life and work in children’s, young adult, and adult literature, including The Eagle of the Ninth, was commented upon in 2003 by one of her editors on a website which I cannot now find (and I posted this first in April last year, 2010). She did have a “mystical communion with the past”, an “uncanny sense of place” and a rude sense of humour. But she certainly did not aspire to being a romantic novelist with books “full of sex”. Nor did she feel she had been “let down” by being “crippled by Stills disease”. And her best work was not only in the first half of her career; she had award-winning books up to the end of her life.

She wrote fine books after the 1950s and 1960s, for example the award-winning Song for a Dark Queen in the 1970s, The Shining Company in the 1980s (which won The USA’s Phoenix Award in 2010), and even her last manuscript Sword Song which was published after her death in the 1990s.Read More »

Children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff said writing for adults only a small gear-change

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

Prompted by The Guardian who recently did an item where ” authors reveal the secrets of their craft … (in) …  interviews with some of our most celebrated writers recorded for the British Library, I am reminded , again, that Rosemary often said that she wrote for children aged 8 to 88, and that she once spoke  in an interview about the difference between writing for children and for adults:

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.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s unique gift for character and description in The Lantern Bearers

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff won the Carnegie Medal in 1959. An American reviewer has said …

I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in my early teens, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. I can still vividly recapture the magic of reading her books. It was a real pleasure to return to The Lantern Bearers, which I first read when I was about thirteen, and find the magic still intact…

The Lantern Bearers is a wonderful book. Sutcliff possesses a unique gift for character and description, evoking a sense of place and person so intense that the reader can almost see her characters and the world in which they move. She has a matchless ability to establish historical context without a surfeit of the “let’s learn a history lesson now” exposition that mars many historical novels for young people. Her books are never less than meticulously researched, but her recreation of the past is so effortless that one has no sense of academic exercise, but rather of a world as close and immediate as everyday.

…  The Arthurian theme was one of Sutcliff’s favorites: she produced several young adult books on the subject, as well as a beautiful adult novel, Sword at Sunset, to my mind one of the best ever written in this genre. But the Sutcliff‘s Arthur is rooted as much in history as in myth–not just the tragic king of Le Morte d’Arthur or the heroic/magical figure of traditional Arthurian fantasy, but a man who might actually have existed, heir both to the memory of Rome and to the last great flowering of Celtic power in Britain.
…  her enduring popularity … is richly merited: she is, quite simply, one of the best.

Copyright © 1997 Victoria Strauss