Rosemary Sutcliff community

This 1250-word essay by Jeffrey Aldridge was written for the collection The Best of Bookmark: Children's Writers Talk About Their Work, material from the Edinburgh-based magazine about children's literature he edited with Pauline Brown and Robbie Robertson, which also included Rosemary Sutcliff's piece "Novelist's Hat and Minstrel's Bonnet". His essay gives a glimpse of Sutcliff from the outside, and also records remarks by the eminent historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett.

(This Desert Island Discs interview gives a few further details on how Sutcliff learned to write about things Scottish).

From the book's introduction, some context for their acquaintance: "Sadly, of course, Rosemary Sutcliff is no longer with us. She and I corresponded regularly, following her first contribution to Bookmark 4 – she was a subscriber, too, saying that she always looked forward to the next issue. I always intended to have an extended interview with her but the opportunity never arose. My personal memoir which concludes this volume stands as an inadequate substitute."

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"Novelist's Hat and Minstrel's Bonnet" is an essay of about 1350 words in which Rosemary Sutcliff reflects on her evolving style of writing, and the relationship between her historical fiction and her retellings of myth and legend.

Sutcliff wrote the essay for Bookmark 11, the September 1983 issue of an Edinburgh-based periodical about children's literature she apparently subscribed to and had written for at least once already (Bookmark 4). It was reprinted in the 1994 collection The Best of Bookmark: Children's Writers Talk About Their Work. Also included is "Rosemary Sutcliff – A Personal Memoir" by the editor Jeffrey Aldridge, which I'll post in a few days.

(NB I've ventured to make a couple of edits to the Best of Bookmark text: "has always been my best beloved" instead of "had always been", "of its own accord" instead of "on its own accord". As always, please feel free to point out typos or other issues.)

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This is the most complete list of Rosemary Sutcliff’s essays and interviews that I know of.* Wherever possible, I’ve linked to both the original publication if it's online, and the more easily readable reposts here or elsewhere.

I sourced it from various places: library catalogue WorldCat.org, Barbara L. Talcroft’s monograph Death of the Corn King, Anthony Lawton’s blog, Sandra Garside-Neville’s bibliography, Something About the Author (from which I haven't been able to check out every lead), JSTOR. Other bibliographies I’ve checked give no additional titles.
 
But I would be rather surprised if there weren’t more essays and interviews to be found. Sutcliff’s work at shorter than book length – i.e., in anthologies and periodicals, or other ephemera – isn’t well-documented online. Needless to say, if you know of any other articles by or interviews with Sutcliff, I’d like to hear about them.

At the end of the list, I give what further details I can about five four essays I haven't got hold of, in case someone else wants to look for them. Naturally, if I ever come across them, I’ll link them here.

* One category of essays I have not included: Sutcliff’s introductions to other people’s books. That is another post.

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Another "Autobiographical sketch of Rosemary Sutcliff", from More Junior Authors edited by Muriel Fuller, which you can view on Internet Archive.

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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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A brief life from Speaking for Ourselves: Autobiographical Sketches by Notable Authors of Books for Young Adults edited by Donald R. Gallo, a volume intended as a resource for schoolchildren writing book reports.

Like her 1983 memoir Blue Remembered Hills, this potted autobiography concludes at the beginning of her writing career. An implied "happily ever after"? But I'd still like to read the sequel.

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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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There's some interesting background on The Shield Ring and The Eagle of the Ninth in this piece from British Children's Authors: Interviews at Home by Cornelia Jones and Olivia R. Way, which you can read here on Internet Archive. It looks like an essay at first glance, as the interviewers have not included most of their own side of the conversation.

The book mentioned as an inspiration for The Shield Ring is perhaps by Nicholas Size, in what I think a plausible guess by a commenter on the official blog. (I say "guess" because I don't know her source. If you do, tell us!) We will learn from a later essay it was non-fiction, not a novel. I.e. if Size was indeed the author, The Epic of Buttermere not The Secret Valley. Anyone familiar with either?

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Sutcliff was interviewed by Emma Fisher in 1973 for a book entitled The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children's Literature (edited by Fisher and Justin Wintle, 1974), which you can read here on Internet Archive. The interview contains quite a few interesting remarks, on her own books, on other people's books, and on her beliefs about the world in general.

There are spoilers for The Mark of the Horse Lord and Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine.

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Sutcliff's 2000-word essay on Rudyard Kipling as a children's author and her experience of reading him as a child, written for the December 1965 issue of The Kipling Journal. Sutcliff had earlier published the monograph Rudyard Kipling on the same subject in 1960; parts of the article echo it closely.

The Kipling Society has put its back issues online, so you can read the article in its original context, and the Sutcliff estate's blog has also reposted the article. The cited works by Kipling are available on Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, and other public domain book sites.