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The Hundredth Feather (1984)
Oct. 31st, 2020 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hedgebirdThis is a story by Sutcliff of just under 3000 words, which I think will be new to most readers. It’s a Roman story, in fact the last Roman story of her career. It follows two main characters, an older man and a little girl, dealing with the classic Sutcliff themes of art and sacrifice.
She wrote it for the children's anthology Hundreds and Hundreds, edited by Peter Dickinson: writing and art on the theme of “one hundred” in honour of the centennial of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to which the proceeds were donated. (You can read Dickinson's bits of the book here.)
This story is not among the ones I shared on LiveJournal in 2012-14, collected byisis in the Short Stories by Rosemary Sutcliff e-book, because at the time I didn’t know it existed! It’s not in any Sutcliff bibliography I’ve read. I only came across a mention of it in an article on JSTOR in late 2018.
Some of you may remember that unheard-of Sutcliff stories have turned up before: in late 2013 Google Books digitized an anthology which included “Flowering Dagger”, a story that Sutcliff’s estate, not to mention fandom, was not previously aware of. Like I said about her non-fiction, Sutcliff’s contributions to anthologies remain rather obscure, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are more out there that few of us know about.
( Read more... )
She wrote it for the children's anthology Hundreds and Hundreds, edited by Peter Dickinson: writing and art on the theme of “one hundred” in honour of the centennial of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to which the proceeds were donated. (You can read Dickinson's bits of the book here.)
This story is not among the ones I shared on LiveJournal in 2012-14, collected by
isis in the Short Stories by Rosemary Sutcliff e-book, because at the time I didn’t know it existed! It’s not in any Sutcliff bibliography I’ve read. I only came across a mention of it in an article on JSTOR in late 2018. Some of you may remember that unheard-of Sutcliff stories have turned up before: in late 2013 Google Books digitized an anthology which included “Flowering Dagger”, a story that Sutcliff’s estate, not to mention fandom, was not previously aware of. Like I said about her non-fiction, Sutcliff’s contributions to anthologies remain rather obscure, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are more out there that few of us know about.
( Read more... )
