sutcliff_space | Aug. 31st, 2020

A paper Sutcliff presented at Travellers in Time, a conference on the theme of time in children's fiction, held by Children's Literature New England at Newnham College, Cambridge in August 1989. The conference proceedings were printed in Travelers in Time: Past, Present and To Come (1990), which you can read on Internet Archive. The essay was also reprinted in Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past (2001), edited by Fiona M. Collins and Judith Graham.

At 5800 words this is the longest by quite a bit of Sutcliff's essays that we've read, and there are many interesting things in it. Some of them may remind you of her 1971 conference paper "History is People". I am always amused to see that she has slightly misremembered the name of her own main character Alexios from Frontier Wolf. The Roman soldier Barates is to be found on his wife Regina's tombstone (RIB 1065), but I don't know who Catherine from medieval London is. If anyone is familiar with her, please enlighten me!