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 legitimate and healthy, but which still runs counter to inherited traditions of modesty and reticence. Rosemary Sutcliff, an honourable retailer and reteller of romance and epic, is the daughter of a naval officer, and a mother who taught her never to cry, always to conceal the fox beneath her cloak. Moreover, she was their only child, and physically handicapped. Deciding to record her early life—from infancy to the acceptance of her first book, in her early twenties—risks flouting the disciplines ingrained in her. It also means that we, the public, are invited to intrude on private griefs, and joys, without being fully admitted to more than one or two of them.

At most points where the story might...