Rosemary Sutcliff community

This 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 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.

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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".

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This brief essay about Sutcliff’s childhood appeared in the February 1953 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, which you can read here. Sutcliff’s reminiscences about her early reading and Miss Beck’s Academy are also found in her 1983 memoir Blue Remembered Hills, as you can see here.

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"An Interview with Rosemary Sutcliff" by John Withrington is another focused on Sword at Sunset. It appeared in the Arthurian journal Quondam et Futurus, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter 1991), as you can see here on JSTOR.

The conversation also ranges over her latest novel The Shining Company, her work in progress Sword Song, the dolphin ring series, naming habits, bowdlerisation, other Arthurian writers, and more interesting tidbits.

Spoilers for Sword at Sunset, The Shining Company, and The Mark of the Horse Lord.

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This is Sutcliff's short acceptance 'speech' for the inaugural 1985 Phoenix Award won by The Mark of the Horse Lord, in which she discusses her feelings about the novel on its twentieth anniversary. It was published as “Rosemary Sutcliff’s thank-you address to the Children’s Literature Association in Arbor, Michigan, 19th May 1985 upon receipt of the Phoenix Award” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Winter 1986), as you can see here. It's also found, along with papers on Sutcliff's work presumably presented at the same time, in The Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association, 1985-1989 (1993), edited by Alethea Helbig and Agnes Perkins.

The Phoenix Award is given to a twenty-year-old children's book that did not win any major awards when first published, chosen by the Children's Literature Association, a US group. Sutcliff won it again, posthumously, for The Shining Company in 2010. You can read the accompanying papers discussing The Shining Company, Blood Feud, and Sword Song here on the ChLA site.

Spoilers: Vague but major for the end of The Mark of the Horse Lord.

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Writing Historical Fiction by Rhona Martin, which you can read on Internet Archive, is about exactly what it says on the tin. The last chapter, Wisdom from On High, contains words of advice from "successful historical authors and others connected with the genre."

Sutcliff's contribution, in full:

Never make the mistake of thinking that you must use all the fruits of your research. You may not need more than a tenth of it; but the other nine-tenths will not be wasted, because it will have enriched and filled out your own knowledge of the place/period/subject of your story.

Nothing is worse for a book than to be clotted with too much and too obvious knowledge, which will stick out like the lumps in a badly made porridge.

The following "interview" is from How Writers Write by Pamela Lloyd, which you can read here on Internet Archive, featuring children's writers of various genres. Rather than a straightforward collection of interviews, the book groups their responses into themed chapters – so you'll have brief remarks from a dozen authors on some aspect of writing. I've collected Sutcliff's answers here, with the chapter titles standing in for the "questions." The page references (21-2, 49, 64-5, 67-8, 84, 103-4, 131, 142) are to the linked US edition.

If you've been reading along with her essays and interviews, you may recognise a lot of her observations and examples here! Let us say that a fondness for revisiting her themes is characteristic of her non-fiction as well as her fiction.

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This interview by Roy Plomley is an episode of BBC Radio's long-running programme Desert Island Discs, broadcast on 1 October 1983. Each episode covers the guest's life and the eight records they'd prefer to be marooned with. Sutcliff's interview followed the 1983 publication of her memoir Blue Remembered Hills and draws largely on it, as well as Plomley's standard questions for writers and other castaways. You can listen to the interview on the BBC site or your usual purveyor of podcasts, under Desert Island Discs Archive 1981-1985. It's about 30 minutes long. I do recommend it; she has a rather soothing voice! A transcript is below.

Note: I posted a raw transcript of this interview on LiveJournal in 2014 (part 1, part 2, part 3). This version has been corrected and lightly edited.

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A short piece about some of Sutcliff's experiences working and living with her physical disability, and other people's reactions to it, which you can find over at the official Wordpress blog. It was written for the guide to "Emotions in Focus", an exhibition of art by disabled artists. There's a little more background about the show here from Outsiders, the group that organised it. If you're curious to hear more about Sutcliff's own experience, check out her memoir, Blue Remembered Hills.

An essay of 1500 words describing a piece of Sutcliff's juvenilia which sounds quite charming, from the anthology The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, which you can read here at Internet Archive. She later mentioned this early story in her 1983 memoir Blue Remembered Hills, with some slightly different details as you can see here. The essay also discusses some trade-offs of inexperience and experience as a writer – I'd love to know if the writers here agree.

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