sutcliff_space | A Sense of Story (1971)

This short, untitled reflection on Sutcliff's career to date is from A Sense of Story: Essays on Contemporary Writers for Children by John Rowe Townsend, which you can read here on Internet Archive. The book consists mainly of his critical essays, but each is followed by a note from the author in question, and a bibliography. (A word of caution about the bibliography: "The Making of an Outlaw" listed as a short story is actually the excerpted first chapter of the novel The Chronicles of Robin Hood.)

Friends, I am Done posting Sutcliff's essays and interviews (kindly overlook the shambles of my chronological ordering. I kept finding more.) In a day or two I'll post a roundup of the links. But stay tuned: the last thing I'll post is Sutcliff's 1984 short story, "The Hundredth Feather".

Rosemary Sutcliff writes:

It seems incredible, when I stop to think about it, that I have been writing books, mostly children’s though a few adults’, for more than twenty years. The day the letter arrived from Oxford University Press accepting The Queen Elizabeth Story still seems so near and vivid, and yet a little as though it had happened to somebody else. When, for one reason or another, I dip into one of my early books, it’s as though they had been written by somebody else, too.

And they all seem to have been written so easily. They don’t only seem, they were written so easily. In those early days I didn’t know how hard it was to write books – at least books that satisfy the deep inner inquiring something in oneself – and so I embarked on them with complete lightheartedness, and they simply ‘came’. I was a little like the bumblebee. The bumblebee, so I have been told, has according to all the laws of aerodynamics insufficient wing-power to become airborne, but nobody has told the bumblebee this, and so it flies around quite happily. Nobody in those days had told me about the strains and stresses of creating; I learned them for myself as time – and books – went by and I became more and more aware of what was entailed. I think one of the troubles is that with each book one becomes more and more of a perfectionist (and perfectionists do not always produce the best results) and also perhaps one feels the need to go deeper and deeper into one’s subject. (The characterization, the motivation, the ethos of The Mark of the Horse Lord are very far removed from those of The Eagle of the Ninth, which is still, alas, my favourite among my own books.) One can’t stop this process any more than one can stop growth or undo an experience. I suppose that’s why my books have tended over the years to be written for older and older age-groups, or rather, to have appealed to older and older age-groups, because I have never written for any age-group at all, but merely for myself.

That, also, is why it’s a relief to write an occasional adult book; though I should hate to switch to adult books altogether. 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 quite a small gear-change. But there are problems in writing officially for children, certain subjects that have to be treated carefully even when they are not altogether tabu, for the sake of publishers, librarians and parents rather than for the children themselves: motives and relationships that have to be a little simplified. And so in some ways it is harder to write a children’s book than an adults’, and it can be enlarging to take a deep breath now and then and, knowing that there are no holds barred, embark on a book such as Sword at Sunset or The Flowers of Adonis.