‘This is the best kind of historical fiction, far too good to be limited to children’s bookshelves.’ – Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff in Slightly Foxed Issue 63
Greetings from Hoxton Square where, with the leaf-scattered pavements and the beginnings of a chill in the air, we are starting to feel really rather autumnal. With the darker evenings creeping in, we thought now was the perfect time to shine a light on our Rosemary Sutcliff novels, which, suitably bound in autumnal-toned cloth, make for the perfect evening reading.
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 Frontier Wolf, the fourth but chronological third, in 1980. The four books are only loosely interconnected, but together they portray the ebbing away of imperial power from Britain. The three final novels in this brilliant sequence – Dawn Wind, Sword Song and The Shield Ring – continue the story, forming a vivid panorama of the mysterious years from the departure of the Roman Legions, through the Dark Ages to the first decades of Norman rule.
Sutcliff was writing primarily for children, but she never talks down to her readers, and adults too find these novels impossible to putdown. All of them are based on historical fact but it’s Sutcliff’s imaginative brilliance that makes you smell the burning cherry log warming old Uncle Aquila’s cosy study, feel the tension in the air at the Saturnalia Games, and shiver in the icy winds howling round the bleak frontier forts along Hadrian’s Wall. Her protagonists are no cardboard cut-outs but flesh-and-blood people with understandable weaknesses and beset by recognizable human dilemmas, and it’s they who drive the plots. As well as being brilliant reads, together these novels make sense of a far-off period that left its mark on almost every aspect of British life. They had been difficult to find for some time and we’re delighted to have reissued all seven of the Roman and post-Roman novels, with their original illustrations, in a limited, numbered editions.
Please scroll on to read Sue Gaisford’s piece on Rosemary Sutcliff from Slightly Foxed issue 63 and view the titles in our SF Cubs collection.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Isabel, Rebecca, Edie, Ruth & Jennie
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