Rosemary Sutcliff community

Thanks (as always with these articles!) for posting this -- a really interesting read.

Like riventhorn, I'm fascinated she so openly acknowledged the homosexual relationships in her books, especially as homosexuality had only relatively recently been decriminalised in England and Wales (1967) and not yet in the rest of the UK, so mainstream attitudes were definitely not very LGBT-friendly in the UK at the time. And got even less so a few years later, with Section 28 (classic "think of the children" legislation) and so on. It delights me that her books may have been flying under the radar in presenting homosexual relationships as just fine at a time when numerous books were getting banned from school and public libraries -- especially as she says younger children were reading the adult version of Sword at Sunset -- as she was seen as an author of lovely, safe children's classics.