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Sutcliff, Rosemary

the novels of, [4] 25; Blue Remembered Hills, [17] 18; The Eagle of the Ninth; The Silver Branch, [63] 33; Frontier Wolf; The Lantern Bearers, [67] 41; Dawn Wind, [69] 59; Sword Song; The Shield Ring, [71] 39

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20210823130022 Rosemary Sutcliff | Sword Song & The Shield Ring

Rosemary Sutcliff | Sword Song & The Shield Ring

‘Sutcliff was a superb writer with a classicist’s grasp of the era, a poet’s eye for nature and a devilish sense of plot. Fiction this evergreen cannot fail to uplift.’ David Mitchell We’re pleased to report that the final two titles in our Slightly Foxed Cubs series of Rosemary Sutcliff novels, Sword Song and The Shield Ring, are both published on 1 September. We know that many of you have already placed orders for these books, either as part of a limited-edition set of all seven novels or as single titles. As thanks for your enthusiasm and support, we’ve dispatched your copies in advance of publication and they will be with you very soon, if not already, so please do look out for them in the post. The series of Roman and post-Roman novels that began with The Eagle of the Ninth in the Sussex downland has, by the last two books, moved to the north-west coast of England and the Hebridean islands, where the Vikings are expanding their empire . . .
20210818142624 C. Walter Hodges || Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword Song and The Shield Ring

Magical Talisman

Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword Song & The Shield Ring

It’s silly to covet a piece of jewellery. When would you really wear Marie-Antoinette’s necklace or the Hope Diamond? Even the glittering parures paraded by red-carpet celebrities are borrowed, insured for millions and necessitate the accompaniment of burly heavies all the way back to the soft obscurity of velvet and safe. Ridiculous. But – all the same – how lovely it would be, just once, for a few minutes, to hold in one’s hands the ring of the Aquilas.
20210312173513 Dawn Wind | Light in the Dark Ages

Dawn Wind | Light in the Dark Ages

‘In Dawn Wind, the fifth of her novels on Roman and post-Roman Britain, Rosemary Sutcliff is, as always, bang on the money . . .’ So writes Sue Gaisford in her article on the latest addition to our Slightly Foxed Cubs series of classic children’s books, and we couldn’t agree more. We’re delighted to have published Rosemary Sutcliff’s Dawn Wind this month and, for those of you who have placed orders for this title, it will be with you very soon, if not already. Though most of her books were written primarily for children, the flesh-and-blood reality of Rosemary Sutcliff’s characters, her convincing plots and her brilliant reimagining of everyday life in a remote and mysterious Britain have always attracted adult readers too. Dawn Wind is no exception. Within its opening pages we’re introduced to Owain, the book’s teenage hero who has both Roman and British blood in his veins, and learn that he is the sole survivor of a terrible battle with the Saxons. We do hope you’ll enjoy this latest offering, whether you’re a young reader or simply young at heart.
20210301101538 Sue Gaisford, Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind, SF 69

Light in the Dark Ages

Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind

Nobody likes losing a pet. But for Owain it is the very last straw. His father and his older brother were killed in the last great battle against the invading Saxons, a battle which he himself barely survived; he gave up his own freedom and became enslaved, to save the life of a sick girl he had befriended; his country, his home and his own family have been either overrun or destroyed and now Dog, his only friend, has been cruelly, pointlessly killed. Who could blame him for feeling suicidal?
20201030175147 Rosemary Sutcliff | The Lantern Bearers

Rosemary Sutcliff | The Lantern Bearers

We were delighted to publish two new titles in our Slightly Foxed Cubs series of highly collectable classic children’s books last month: Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff. Sutcliff’s four great novels set during the last years of the Roman occupation of Britain, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers (winner of the 1959 Carnegie Prize), tell the story of several generations of the Aquila family, from the Empire’s glory days to its final withdrawal, weakened by increasing pressure from Saxon raiders and internal power struggles at home. Though most of her books were written primarily for children, the flesh-and-blood reality of her characters, her convincing plots and her brilliant reimagining of everyday life in a remote and mysterious Britain have always attracted adult readers too. They have been difficult to find for some time and we’re delighted to be reissuing them with their original illustrations.
20200901103947 Charles Keeping - Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers

The Last of Rome

Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Frontier Wolf & The Lantern Bearers

Desperation drove me to Horatius, one gloomy afternoon in late October. Thirty restless children were waiting to be entertained, educated or even just dissuaded from rioting by their hapless supply teacher. I gave them Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome – largely because my father’s recitation of ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge’ had so grabbed and held my own attention, decades earlier. The drama of the thing still worked its magic: the bridge fell with a crash like thunder, whereupon ‘a long shout of triumph rose from the walls of Rome / As to the highest turret-tops was splashed the yellow foam’. My father would put gleeful stress on the word ‘yellow’. Then, of course, brave Horatius, fully armed and uttering a powerful prayer to Father Tiber, hurls himself into the turbulent river and makes it to the other shore.
20041201151152 Charles Keeping, Dawn Wind - David Gilmour on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers - Slightly Foxed Issue 4

Ancient Worlds

David Gilmour on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers

I was thus apprehensive, for my sake as well as my children’s, when I encouraged them to read Rosemary Sutcliff. I wondered whether I would still be drawn to her ancient worlds, her vanished races among the Caledonian Forest, her harpers and her war hosts, her bonfire festivals of Lammas and Beltane, her mead horns at Saxon feastings, her evocations of the last of Roman Britain. I need not have worried. The magic was still there. In his pantheon of literary heroes and heroines, Giuseppe di Lampedusa reserved the highest places for the authors he called creatori di mondi. Rosemary Sutcliff was such a writer, a creator of worlds, lost worlds, often worlds of lost causes, of the departing legions, of Arthurian Britain, of the last stand of the Lakeland Norsemen against the knights of William Rufus. But they are not simply worlds of battle-axes and war horns. Her imagination encompassed the natural world, a feeling for its rites and a knowledge of its workings. Some of her most beautiful passages describe the changing of seasons, the ways of wolf packs, the flights of wild geese, the solitudes of the east coast marshes. And no one (except perhaps Kipling) has handled the death of a devoted dog better than she did in Dawn Wind.
20080301121744 Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills - Slightly Foxed: Plain Foxed Edition

The Truth of the Heart

Hazel Wood on Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills

I grew up in a house on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a bay. There was an upstairs drawing-room which was never used, and in the evenings when I was a little girl, I would go up there and close the door. Kneeling on the window-seat, I would gaze out at the sunset over the sea and the clouds banking on the horizon, and escape into my imagination. In those clouds I saw horses and chariots, marching legions, the thronged streets of medieval towns, knights in armour, great ships in full sail on a golden sea – vivid images from the books my father read me. The worlds they conjured up were consoling and utterly real to me, and I lived in them more than I lived in the present.
20190901132937 Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch

The Sound of Chariots

Sue Gaisford on the Roman Britain novels of Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff knew about chariots. In the first of her four Roman books, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), her young hero, the centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila, politely suggests to his British friend Cradoc that the British are all charioteers. Cradoc replies (accurately): ‘The British can all drive after a fashion; not every one is a charioteer.’ Marcus, however, is the real thing, the best in his Legion. Elegantly he slaloms Cradoc’s four strong little black stallions through planted spears, and then, reaching open land, he gives them their heads and they are off, at full gallop.
20190822115041

The Roman Novels by Rosemary Sutcliff

Slightly Foxed Cubs

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920‒92) wrote three of her four great historical novels for children set during the last years of the Roman occupation of Britain – The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers (winner of the Carnegie Medal) – between 1954 and 1959, and the fourth, Frontier Wolf, which comes third in the chronological story, in 1980. Slightly Foxed is now reissuing all four of the Roman novels, with their original illustrations, in a limited, numbered edition.

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