Led there by the excellent appreciative bluerememberedhills.blogspot.com I found this post to an ancient history website in 2003.
” 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 – many of her protagonists have physical disabilities of one kind or another. 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.
She had, as did Henry Treece, a mystical communion with the past, which enabled her both to recreate tiny details, and to confound military historians with her understanding of the art of battle in any situation she cared to devise. Her sense of place was uncanny, in that she could get no nearer to a site than the seat of a car on an adjacent road. Friends often served as her eyes, and also as her researchers, but it was the conclusions she drew from the evidence, and her re-creations of them, that made her contribution to the literature about the ancient world so distinctive. Where she was simply embellishing recorded history, she was no better than anyone else.
She also had one of the rudest senses of humour in anyone I have met.”
I grew up with Rosemary and much rings very true to me. She did indeed have a rude sense of humour (in both senses). I am not so sure about her wanting to be a romantic novelist above all. Nor do I think her finest books were only in the 1950s an 1960s; for example the award-winning Song for a Dark Queen was written in the 1970s. Her autobiography, Blue Remembered Hills points to the romantic love of her life – a rafish RAF pilot who emigrated eventually to Australia.
Categories: Summaries, Reviews & Criticism
With The Lantern Bearers Rosemary won the Carnegie Medal in 1959 . An American review … 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.
Keep reading →
Categories: Summaries, Reviews & Criticism
Eric Eller describes himself as a ‘recovering chemical engineer’. Of Sword at Sunset he writes:”… 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”.
Categories: Summaries, Reviews & Criticism
Rosemary once said of her writing: “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.” (Townsend, John Rowe. 1971. A Sense of Story. London: Longman p. 201)
Categories: Autobiography
Rosemary wrote this for the “Emotions in Focus” exhibition of erotic art by disabled people mounted as a celebration of the International Year of Disabled People 1981. Victor Lownes opened the exhibition at The Round House, London (UK).
Career-wise, I’m one of the lucky ones. My job, as a writer of books, is one of the few in which physical disability presents hardly any problems. I would claim that it presents no problems at all but my kind of book needs research, and research is more difficult for a disabled person. I am less able to see for myself or dig priceless information out of deeply hidden archives. I have to rely more on other people’s help and on libraries. And even libraries can present problems -like one which shall be nameless – which is very proud of its ramp to its entrance but keeps its entire reference department upstairs, with, of course, no lift. Keep reading →
Categories: Autobiography
