SUTCLIFF, Rosemary. Sword song. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sunburst. 272p. map. c1997. 0-374-46984-9. $6.95. JS To quote the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, September 1998: Rosemary Sutcliff died in 1992, when the first draft and much of the revision of this...

The popularity of young adult fiction has given rise to a number of critical studies in this area. Barbara Talcroft's study of Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels adds another to the list. The novels are set mainly in Britain in an historical world which...

[Rosemary Sutcliff's] first four books are for younger children: The Chronicles of Robin Hood (1950), The Queen Elizabeth Story (1950), The Armourer's House (1951), and Brother Dusty-Feet (1952). They are stories of imaginative fancy set in an historical period which provides the framework, but the fairies and the magic are more important than the kings and queens. Into each story the author reweaves some of the legends which are links with her own childhood delight. (p. 16) Rosemary Sutcliff&...

Day to day, minute to minute, second to second the surface of our lives is in a perpetual ripple of change. Below the immediate surface are slower, deeper currents, and below these again are profound mysterious movements beyond the scale of the individual life-span. And far down on the sea-bed are the oldest, most lasting things, whose changes our imagination can hardly grasp at all. The strength of Rosemary Sutcliff's main work—and it is a body of work rather than a shelf of novels—is ...

It can hardly have been by chance that in 1960 it was Rosemary Sutcliff who wrote the Bodley Head monograph on the children's books of Rudyard Kipling, nor is it surprising that in it she remarked " … of all the writers of my childhood, he made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgotten,"… for no reader of her own books—except one totally ignorant of Kipling—can fail to be aware of her debt to him. Quite apart from certain identities o...