Critical Essay by Louise S. Bechtel
"Simon" is the longest and best written of Miss Sutcliff's books, appealing more to readers over twelve. It pictures England of the Civil War i...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Miss Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers ends, it is true, with a victory, but a victory in a war which, the reader is aware throughout the story, is ...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Sherwood Libby
"We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind."...
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Critical Essay by C. S. Bennett
[Knight's Fee is] a splendid rendering of upper-middle-class values. It is set in that Kiplingesque region of English history where Saxon and Norman are being ma...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Rosemary Sutcliff is a master of the concrete detail which brings home to us that our ancestors, though men like ourselves, lived in very different cond...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Meek
[Rosemary Sutcliff's] first four books are for younger children: The Chronicles of Robin Hood (1950), The Queen Elizabeth Story (1950), The Armourer's Hou...
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Critical Essay by Marcus Crouch
Rosemary Sutcliff is an intuitive historian. This is not to say that she is not most careful and exact in research, but that her ability to think herself back into the ...
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Critical Essay by Padraic Colum
Ever since Standish O'Grady published his bardic history of Ireland in the nineties, storytellers and poets have been exalting Cuchulain….
Cuchulain...
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Critical Essay by Joan V Marder
Miss Sutcliff's first book, a retelling of the Robin Hood legends, and the three which followed, are written for younger children and, while they give pleasure, ...
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Critical Essay by Eleanor Cameron
[The] power of imagination Rosemary Sutcliff needed in order to cast herself back into the minds and feelings of the Bronze Age peoples in Warrior Scarlet is fully as...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
[So] great is the output of legends retold nowadays, amounting almost to a minor industry, that one is entitled to ask not only if the story is well tol...
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Critical Essay by John Rowe Townsend
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...
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Critical Essay by May Hill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland
Most critics would say that at the present time the greatest writer of historical fiction for children and youth is unquestionably Rosemary Sut...
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Critical Essay by Jill Paton Walsh
[It] is now a long time since there was a new major piece of writing from Rosemary Sutcliff. Blood Feud will be eagerly welcomed by admirers of her long and distingu...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
Rosemary Sutcliff is never obvious in her interpretation of old causes lost and won…. Blood Feud is in fact what the book is about, the obligation for vengeance...
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Critical Essay by Sarah Hayes
Rosemary Sutcliff has always enjoyed the idea of the outsider, of the odd one who is isolated by fate to perform some special act. Though it has become almost a formula n...
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Critical Essay by Pauline Clarke
Rosemary Sutcliff has given us [in Song for a Dark Queen] a rounded, convincing and (very properly) rather frightening portrait of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, who le...
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Critical Essay by Elaine Moss
[What] is impressive about Frontier Wolf is not the story itself, nor the gradual winning through of Alexios from disgrace to honour. It is Rosemary Sutcliff's ext...
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Critical Essay by Ann Evans
Very occasionally, the opening sentence of a book works a small miracle on the reader. It is as if a shutter sprang open momentarily, to reveal the essence and truth of the...
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Critical Essay by Marcus Crouch
Rosemary Sutcliff has dwelt so long, imaginatively, in the Dark Ages that she seems not quite at ease in bringing Arthur into the age of chivalry. Future literary histo...
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Critical Essay by Hilary Wright
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...
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Critical Essay by Neil Philip
If there is one story with which every child growing up in Britain should be familiar, it is the story of King Arthur. There is no shortage of retelling, but most of them...
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Critical Essay by Marcus Crouch
[The Road to Camlann] takes up the story [of King Arthur] with Mordred at Camelot, insidiously undermining the fellowship and the spiritual values on which the Round Ta...
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Critical Essay by Sheila A. Egoff
A virtually perfect mesh of history and fiction can be found in the writing of Rosemary Sutcliff. She seems to work from no recipe for mixing fact and imagination and...
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Critical Essay by Neil Philip
[Rosemary Sutcliff] cherishes cultural diversity even while she stresses continuity. And while she upholds such unfashionable virtues as duty, courage, integrity, she has...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
[In The Road to Camlann] Rosemary Sutcliff has assumed a bardic style, rhythmic and full of poetic archaism and reflecting in some ways the manner of medieval poetry. ...
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Critical Essay by Anne Duchene
Autobiography, however much one may try to modify the fact, is essentially the raising of a monument to oneself: an impulse which society may long have acknowledged as l...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Hodges
[In "The Shield Ring"] Rosemary Sutcliff tells the story of young Bjorn, unsure of his own courage but determined to prove himself worthy of the noble ...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Sherwood Libby
A deeply stirring historical tale, one like "The Shield Ring," is rare. The characters are forceful, sympathetic and interesting. There is a sta...
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Critical Essay by J. O. Prestwich
Rosemary Sutcliff has won a reputation as a writer of historical novels for children which always show care and sensitivity and sometimes distinction. Her recent work...
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Critical Essay by Eric Hood
A bronze-age boy had to kill a wolf single-handed before he could wear the warrior's scarlet, the mantle of manhood. For Drem, the test was doubly difficult because ...
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