What do you think?
Rate this book
Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
The historical novelist recalls her childhood and struggle with rheumatoid arthritis that made her unable to walk as a child and describes the family and friends who encouraged her to become a writer
169 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
3 people are currently reading
278 people want to read
About the author
Rosemary Sutcliff
107 books677 followersRosemary Sutcliff, CBE (1920-1992) was a British novelist, best known as a writer of highly acclaimed historical fiction. Although primarily a children's author, the quality and depth of her writing also appeals to adults. She once commented that she wrote "for children of all ages, from nine to ninety."
Born in West Clandon, Surrey, Sutcliff spent her early youth in Malta and other naval bases where her father was stationed as a naval officer. She contracted Still's Disease when she was very young and was confined to a wheelchair for most of her life. Due to her chronic sickness, she spent the majority of her time with her mother, a tireless storyteller, from whom she learned many of the Celtic and Saxon legends that she would later expand into works of historical fiction. Her early schooling being continually interrupted by moving house and her disabling condition, Sutcliff didn't learn to read until she was nine, and left school at fourteen to enter the Bideford Art School, which she attended for three years, graduating from the General Art Course. She then worked as a painter of miniatures.
Rosemary Sutcliff began her career as a writer in 1950 with The Chronicles of Robin Hood. She found her voice when she wrote The Eagle of the Ninth in 1954. In 1959, she won the Carnegie Medal for The Lantern Bearers and was runner-up in 1972 with Tristan and Iseult. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Her The Mark of the Horse Lord won the first Phoenix Award in 1985.
Sutcliff lived for many years in Walberton near Arundel, Sussex. In 1975 she was appointed OBE for services to Children's Literature and promoted to CBE in 1992. She wrote incessantly throughout her life, and was still writing on the morning of her death. She never married.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/rosema...
Born in West Clandon, Surrey, Sutcliff spent her early youth in Malta and other naval bases where her father was stationed as a naval officer. She contracted Still's Disease when she was very young and was confined to a wheelchair for most of her life. Due to her chronic sickness, she spent the majority of her time with her mother, a tireless storyteller, from whom she learned many of the Celtic and Saxon legends that she would later expand into works of historical fiction. Her early schooling being continually interrupted by moving house and her disabling condition, Sutcliff didn't learn to read until she was nine, and left school at fourteen to enter the Bideford Art School, which she attended for three years, graduating from the General Art Course. She then worked as a painter of miniatures.
Rosemary Sutcliff began her career as a writer in 1950 with The Chronicles of Robin Hood. She found her voice when she wrote The Eagle of the Ninth in 1954. In 1959, she won the Carnegie Medal for The Lantern Bearers and was runner-up in 1972 with Tristan and Iseult. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Her The Mark of the Horse Lord won the first Phoenix Award in 1985.
Sutcliff lived for many years in Walberton near Arundel, Sussex. In 1975 she was appointed OBE for services to Children's Literature and promoted to CBE in 1992. She wrote incessantly throughout her life, and was still writing on the morning of her death. She never married.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/rosema...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
May 9, 2020
It is unusual for me to read a memoir without knowing much at all of either the author or her work. Sutcliff is a beloved author for many; a Carnegie award winner, and the writer of many historical novels for children. But for some reason, I never came across her writing when I was a child, and nor have I managed to discover her during my adult years in England. I have managed to fill in many gaps in my childhood reading, but not this one. Occasionally, reading a memoir can be the springboard for exploring an author’s life and work - and I think that will definitely be the case for Sutcliff, as I adored the ‘voice’ of her writing.
This memoir is both chronological and coming-of-age: it begins with Sutcliff’s earliest memories (early indeed) and ends with those two major life events, falling in love for the first time, and discovering her true vocation. In one sense, it couldn’t have been predicted that Sutcliff would become a writer. According to her own self-assessment, she was not much of a student and she left school at 14. Art was her ‘one’ talent, and she pursued an art degree between the ages of 14 and 17. But in another sense, perhaps this solitary career was not so unexpected. Her mother, whose colourful presence looms large in the book, was a natural dramatist and storyteller; she also gave Sutcliff a passionate interest in history. The other important strand of her life history was the juvenile arthritis (Still’s disease) which meant that she spent most of her childhood in a wheelchair or nursing home. As an only child, she was nearly always in the company of adults. And by late childhood, her family had moved to a remote part of North Devon. In other words, she must have lived largely in her own imagination. She clearly was a close observer. As she says of herself, “Looking back I think that I was happy with pathetically little.”
I read this memoir during the Coronavirus Quarantine, and like any book set during World War II - Sutcliff was an adolescent during that time - it reminds the present-day reader that we really don’t know much about isolation and privation. Sutcliff is no Pollyanna, and as she gets older she certainly becomes aware of much loneliness plagues her. But she has all of the qualities more common to her generation: humour, stoicism, lack of self-pity and amazing bravery.
It’s a gem of a memoir.
This memoir is both chronological and coming-of-age: it begins with Sutcliff’s earliest memories (early indeed) and ends with those two major life events, falling in love for the first time, and discovering her true vocation. In one sense, it couldn’t have been predicted that Sutcliff would become a writer. According to her own self-assessment, she was not much of a student and she left school at 14. Art was her ‘one’ talent, and she pursued an art degree between the ages of 14 and 17. But in another sense, perhaps this solitary career was not so unexpected. Her mother, whose colourful presence looms large in the book, was a natural dramatist and storyteller; she also gave Sutcliff a passionate interest in history. The other important strand of her life history was the juvenile arthritis (Still’s disease) which meant that she spent most of her childhood in a wheelchair or nursing home. As an only child, she was nearly always in the company of adults. And by late childhood, her family had moved to a remote part of North Devon. In other words, she must have lived largely in her own imagination. She clearly was a close observer. As she says of herself, “Looking back I think that I was happy with pathetically little.”
I read this memoir during the Coronavirus Quarantine, and like any book set during World War II - Sutcliff was an adolescent during that time - it reminds the present-day reader that we really don’t know much about isolation and privation. Sutcliff is no Pollyanna, and as she gets older she certainly becomes aware of much loneliness plagues her. But she has all of the qualities more common to her generation: humour, stoicism, lack of self-pity and amazing bravery.
It’s a gem of a memoir.
He must have been one of those very special people, beloved of the gods, for whom time is elastic and can always be stretched out to play with a child.
Generally speaking, I do not think that one should ever take another person’s advice in the things of life that really matter, but follow the dictates of the still small something in one’s innermost self.
There are times when life seems to fall into complete patterns, with all the loose ends neatly darned in. It could be chance, or it could be that Fate has a sense of pattern, or it could be God taking an interest.
December 23, 2014
Rosemary Sutcliff’s excellent memoir of her childhood and young adulthood is just as readable as her historic stories for children. This short account carries through her young adulthood, first love, training to become a portrait artist and first book. In particular, the author excels at deftly presenting family, friends and others with insight and balance, including her somewhat difficult relationship with her mother. She portrays the English countryside with the same insight and appreciation. Ms. Sutcliff underwent numerous treatments and surgeries for rheumatoid arthritis as a child; the author writes of these briefly with amazing honesty and acceptance.
Read via the Open Library website.
Read via the Open Library website.
September 29, 2013
This is the best book I've read in months.
I wasn't expecting that at all when I checked it out from the library yesterday. I've read a few of Sutcliff's novels. But I only started Blue Remembered Hills, her memoir, because after The Shield Ring I wanted to know what, if anything, she'd written about her own disability.
She did indeed write a lot about her disability. (She developed juvenile arthritis at age two, underwent regular surgeries and treatments throughout her childhood and adolescence, and was never able-bodied.) Here's a bit I liked, from her teens:
What else did she write about? Well, she was born in 1920, published this book in 1983, and died in 1992. To my intense regret, she ended the memoir with the publication of her first books in 1950. So she didn't write about more than half of her life! In the last paragraph she says that while Blue Remembered Hills is the only record of her life before she became a published author, soon after that she began to write a diary. I really hope that it's around still in some library collection, because I would very much like to read it someday (or, at least, for someone to write a proper biography of her, but her own words would be best).
She wrote in Blue Remembered Hills about her childhood and, less, about her adolescence--an only child, with an overly-invested, dramatic, needy mother (the bit about the two miles is quite typical) and a father in the Navy, thus frequently absent. They lived briefly in Malta, then returned to England, to vividly-remembered flowers, a circuit of hospitals, uncles and aunts, dogs, and books. She left school at fourteen and went to art school; her contribution during the war was to paint designs on canvas to send to prisoners of war so that they could make tapestries. At her parents' encouragement, she began a career as a miniaturist; though she was good at this, her frustration at the limitations of miniature-painting led her to begin writing in secret.
I'm not conveying what makes this such a good book, though. Let me give you a bit more of it.
I wasn't expecting that at all when I checked it out from the library yesterday. I've read a few of Sutcliff's novels. But I only started Blue Remembered Hills, her memoir, because after The Shield Ring I wanted to know what, if anything, she'd written about her own disability.
She did indeed write a lot about her disability. (She developed juvenile arthritis at age two, underwent regular surgeries and treatments throughout her childhood and adolescence, and was never able-bodied.) Here's a bit I liked, from her teens:
I could, in fact, walk reasonably well; and my mother was determined that I should be able to walk two miles. If you could walk two miles, she said, you could get to most places you needed to go. Actually, this is a fallacy. The fact that you can, with great difficulty, and taking an unconscionable time about it, walk two miles, will not get you anywhere you need, or at any rate want, to go. There were times when a wheelchair would have added another dimension to my life, but that was a forbidden subject; and it was not until many, many years later, long after my father and I were alone, that I took the law into my own hands and bought one; and instantly, dazzled with the new freedom that it bought me, swept my father off to his old haunts on an Hellenic cruise.There are other bits I wanted to quote, but to keep this post to a reasonable length (and to encourage you to read the book yourself if you are curious) I will just say that to my untrained eye, what Sutcliff says about physical disability (she said little about any other kind) would not be out of place in a Blogging Against Disablism blog carnival.
What else did she write about? Well, she was born in 1920, published this book in 1983, and died in 1992. To my intense regret, she ended the memoir with the publication of her first books in 1950. So she didn't write about more than half of her life! In the last paragraph she says that while Blue Remembered Hills is the only record of her life before she became a published author, soon after that she began to write a diary. I really hope that it's around still in some library collection, because I would very much like to read it someday (or, at least, for someone to write a proper biography of her, but her own words would be best).
She wrote in Blue Remembered Hills about her childhood and, less, about her adolescence--an only child, with an overly-invested, dramatic, needy mother (the bit about the two miles is quite typical) and a father in the Navy, thus frequently absent. They lived briefly in Malta, then returned to England, to vividly-remembered flowers, a circuit of hospitals, uncles and aunts, dogs, and books. She left school at fourteen and went to art school; her contribution during the war was to paint designs on canvas to send to prisoners of war so that they could make tapestries. At her parents' encouragement, she began a career as a miniaturist; though she was good at this, her frustration at the limitations of miniature-painting led her to begin writing in secret.
I'm not conveying what makes this such a good book, though. Let me give you a bit more of it.
Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. It was a boarding-school world [...]I would also like to show you something from the end, about a relationship she was in, and what happened to it. But I can't just quote it. That part builds up from early on in the book, from what she's said about about her family dynamics, and loneliness, and how she and her family and English society in the 1940s thought about her disability. It is complex and humane and sad in a way that utterly defies pity.
In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana ...'
But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but one could only act Lilian and Diana; we could not be them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too...
December 3, 2017
Recently I read "The Silver Branch," a novel by Sutcliff. I liked it very much and started to explore what else the author had written. I noticed that she had written "a recollection" about her own life. (While in grad school I had done an independent study focusing on authors who wrote their autobiography, memoir, or recollection. It was one of my favorite classes, partly because I chose the topic, but partly because of the books that I discovered).
Sutcliff had Still's disease as a child which subjected her to many painful surgical procedures, isolation in hospitals, and general exclusion from mainstream society. Despite her extensive trials I found "Blue Remembered Hills" to contain much charm, historical information, and was a delightful pleasure to read.
I will share some of my favorite quotes with you.
"Squirrels chittered at us from behind branches, red squirrels lilting from branch to branch in the autumn sunlight like wisps of wind-torn flame."
"...and the crowing of a cock in the green first-light of my first morning, every first morning of every leave we spent there, was part of Mrs. Penhorwood to me. On later mornings it would be a nice sound, but not especially magical. But in that first dawn it would fall on my town-dulled ears, as something very magical indeed, something to shiver at with delight and something stranger than mere delight. It was the perfect sound to enter through magic casements opening wide on perilous seas and fairylands forlorn. It was a sound with a blossom on it, like dew, and shaped like a fleur-de-lys."
"We were happy, sharing a kind of peace at being together again. It seemed strange that I could be so happy. It was a broken-winged happiness that could not fly any more, but it was there, all the same,..."
Sutcliff had Still's disease as a child which subjected her to many painful surgical procedures, isolation in hospitals, and general exclusion from mainstream society. Despite her extensive trials I found "Blue Remembered Hills" to contain much charm, historical information, and was a delightful pleasure to read.
I will share some of my favorite quotes with you.
"Squirrels chittered at us from behind branches, red squirrels lilting from branch to branch in the autumn sunlight like wisps of wind-torn flame."
"...and the crowing of a cock in the green first-light of my first morning, every first morning of every leave we spent there, was part of Mrs. Penhorwood to me. On later mornings it would be a nice sound, but not especially magical. But in that first dawn it would fall on my town-dulled ears, as something very magical indeed, something to shiver at with delight and something stranger than mere delight. It was the perfect sound to enter through magic casements opening wide on perilous seas and fairylands forlorn. It was a sound with a blossom on it, like dew, and shaped like a fleur-de-lys."
"We were happy, sharing a kind of peace at being together again. It seemed strange that I could be so happy. It was a broken-winged happiness that could not fly any more, but it was there, all the same,..."
January 8, 2023
Very enjoyable. As an only child myself - I could identify with some of the issues she had with her parents.
April 24, 2022
3.5 I’ve never read anything else by Rosemary Sutcliff, but I still enjoyed this story of her childhood and how she became a writer. There were some delightful character sketches and she writes with both a sympathetic and an honest remembrance. Sutcliff captures how innocent children are and how shaped we are by the things around us when we are young. The descriptions of her struggles with juvenile arthritis are moving and sometimes painful to read, though overall Sutcliff doesn’t dwell on the pain or the challenge it must have presented to her and to her parents. I’m eager to read some of her fiction now to see how she uses her descriptive powers in a story.
Oh, I was also interested in the description of her father’s wartime service. He was career Navy but had been retired from active service before WWII. His jobs in the war were to transport troops, accompany merchant ships across the seas, work as a commander in a dockyard, and participate in D-Day by sinking an old ship in the shallows off a Normandy beach. (The beach didn’t up end being used.) I have never read about this kind of wartime service so I found it fascinating. Of course there were many men serving in this way and playing very important roles without being in active war zones.
Oh, I was also interested in the description of her father’s wartime service. He was career Navy but had been retired from active service before WWII. His jobs in the war were to transport troops, accompany merchant ships across the seas, work as a commander in a dockyard, and participate in D-Day by sinking an old ship in the shallows off a Normandy beach. (The beach didn’t up end being used.) I have never read about this kind of wartime service so I found it fascinating. Of course there were many men serving in this way and playing very important roles without being in active war zones.
November 27, 2016
Sutcliff weaves her usual gorgeous depictions of her much-loved English countryside with piercing observations about the nature of childhood, family, and disability. Bluntly honest but never cruel, she comes across as a person that I would very much have liked to have had as a friend. Alas, I'll have to satisfy myself with reading and rereading her books. My one regret is that this memoir covers only the first twenty-five years of her life; it ends with a tantalizing reference to the diaries that she began keeping later in life, but to the best of my knowledge they have never been published or made available to the public. I hope someday someone makes use of them to write a full biography of this brilliant, fascinating woman.
July 12, 2020
I know, as I suspect most people know, Rosemary Sutcliffe as the writer of exciting historical fiction for intelligent children--Eagle of the Ninth being one of my, and of my children's, favorites. But in this book, Sutcliffe recounts her childhood and upbringing as a child with serious disabilities (severe juvenile arthritis), all the way until her first book was accepted for publication by the Oxford University Press. It is a beautifully written book--remarkably without any sense of victimhood or bitterness. Sutcliffe is able to show her development as a child into an adolescent, from home to new home (her father was in the British navy), meeting kind people as well as bullies. Throughout it all is a sense of gratitude and objective observation--which are two qualities too rare today and very much alive in her books.
Among some beautiful parts:
"A hospital is a busy place at the best of times, the scene constantly in motion while always remaining the same, constant shift and change and hideous monotony swirling together like oil and water that mingle but never mix."
Highly recommend to people who remember reading Sutcliffe as children.
Among some beautiful parts:
"A hospital is a busy place at the best of times, the scene constantly in motion while always remaining the same, constant shift and change and hideous monotony swirling together like oil and water that mingle but never mix."
Highly recommend to people who remember reading Sutcliffe as children.
December 22, 2020
A delightful memoir of Rosemary Sutcliff's memories of (mainly) her early childhood. Quite early she ended up in a wheelchair, unable to walk despite numerous operations. This did not stop her from writing, among her books are The Eagle of Ninth (one of the "Roman" novels) and Sword by Sunset (an Arthurian novel).
It is not a sad memoir, far from it, it is filled with loads of optimism!
It is not a sad memoir, far from it, it is filled with loads of optimism!
January 2, 2024
One of my favourite childhood authors but I didn’t know this book existed until now. Delightful. Recommended.
October 5, 2011
Rosemary Sutcliff's autobiography mainly covers the years before she began to write, though of course the experiences recorded here were formative ones. Mostly, she writes about her parents, and her struggles with disability.
It's pretty fascinating to hear about her childhood, to guess at how this or that was linked to her writing. There's always something warm about Rosemary Sutcliff's writing, even when she's talking about battles and the like, and that's present here too. She accepts a lot of what happens to her -- and I don't just refer to her disability, but also to her loves -- in that same warm way, somehow.
I really want to read more of her work now. I had quite a lot of it as a child, I thought, but actually I only had a fraction of her books. I'll have to look into that.
It's pretty fascinating to hear about her childhood, to guess at how this or that was linked to her writing. There's always something warm about Rosemary Sutcliff's writing, even when she's talking about battles and the like, and that's present here too. She accepts a lot of what happens to her -- and I don't just refer to her disability, but also to her loves -- in that same warm way, somehow.
I really want to read more of her work now. I had quite a lot of it as a child, I thought, but actually I only had a fraction of her books. I'll have to look into that.
May 18, 2025
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/blue-remembered-hills-by-rosemary-sutcliff/
As a child and teenager, I enjoyed a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels – I particularly remember the Eagle of the Ninth trilogy, The Hound of Ulster, and Warrior Scarlet. I picked up this autobiography a while back without really looking at it, and plucked it off the shelves at random the other day, interested to get to know more about a much-loved writer. (She lived from 1920 to 1993.)
My first surprise, once I actually looked at the front cover, was to see that it has an introduction by Tom Shakespeare. I knew Tom vaguely when we were students at Cambridge, and he once managed to get a front page photograph in the Guardian by eating fire on King’s Parade in protest at the government’s student loans proposals. We’ve exchanged the odd note over the last few years. He has achondroplasia, the most visible symptom of which is dwarfism, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the politics of disability.
Why, I wondered, would he write a foreword to Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography? I supposed that he might have shared my youthful enthusiasm for her writing, possibly even more so (he started Cambridge with the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic course, before switching to Social and Political Sciences). My copy of the book, which features a head-and-neck photograph of Sutcliff, failed to give me the vital clue that the two earlier editions would have done as soon as I looked at them.
Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and suffered various medical treatments and operations which were deemed necessary by the doctors advising her parents. (Tom Shakespeare points out that “orthopaedics” literally means “putting children right”.) She spent long periods in hospitals, isolated from her family and her few friends. (She was an only child; a sister had died before she was born.) As an adult, she used a wheelchair (after the death of her mother, who refused to allow her to have one). Writing cannot have been comfortable for her; but at her peak, she wrote 1800 words a day, by hand.
Once you know all this, a lot about her writing makes more sense. Tom Shakespeare lists nineteen of her novels where a major character has either a congenital or an acquired physical disability, and comments, “I cannot think of another writer who has done more or better.” And her disabled characters are not defined by their disabilities. They are simply people getting along as best they can in challenging circumstances. And it makes sense to choose Tom Shakespeare as the writer of the introduction to the book.
Sutcliff’s father was in the Navy, her mother was difficult (possibly bipolar) and her childhood was one of bouncing around between different ports, including Sheerness, Chatham and more exotically Malta. She was very slow to learn to read and write, left school at fourteen and worked as an artist until she rather suddenly became a full-time writer at the age of twenty-nine.
Having said all of that, it’s not a sad book. We live the life we get to live, and Sutcliffe makes the most of it, with occasional shafts of real humour. “I have always been sorry for children born more than two hundred years ago, and therefore denied the pleasure of popping fuchsia buds.” (This got some extraordinary responses when I posted it to Facebook.) She has a great eye for the countryside, and depicts friends and pets with love and candour. It’s a portrait of a particular time from a particular viewpoint, but it’s very nicely done.
In the last couple of chapters, she tells of her romantic relationship with Rupert King, a year younger than her but already separated from his first wife and the father of two sons. Eventually he decided to marry someone else, and she decided that she could not bear to be the third person in that relationship. It’s an intense and ultimately unhappy story, but she clearly feels that this thwarted romance was good for her in the end. I did a bit of my own delving on Rupert, using the online genealogy resources; he was married four times in all, with three more children on top of the two from his first marriage, and ended up in Australia. I don’t think he’d have made Rosemary happy in the medium to long term.
Anyway, brief, punchy, evocative, well worth it.
As a child and teenager, I enjoyed a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels – I particularly remember the Eagle of the Ninth trilogy, The Hound of Ulster, and Warrior Scarlet. I picked up this autobiography a while back without really looking at it, and plucked it off the shelves at random the other day, interested to get to know more about a much-loved writer. (She lived from 1920 to 1993.)
My first surprise, once I actually looked at the front cover, was to see that it has an introduction by Tom Shakespeare. I knew Tom vaguely when we were students at Cambridge, and he once managed to get a front page photograph in the Guardian by eating fire on King’s Parade in protest at the government’s student loans proposals. We’ve exchanged the odd note over the last few years. He has achondroplasia, the most visible symptom of which is dwarfism, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the politics of disability.
Why, I wondered, would he write a foreword to Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography? I supposed that he might have shared my youthful enthusiasm for her writing, possibly even more so (he started Cambridge with the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic course, before switching to Social and Political Sciences). My copy of the book, which features a head-and-neck photograph of Sutcliff, failed to give me the vital clue that the two earlier editions would have done as soon as I looked at them.
Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and suffered various medical treatments and operations which were deemed necessary by the doctors advising her parents. (Tom Shakespeare points out that “orthopaedics” literally means “putting children right”.) She spent long periods in hospitals, isolated from her family and her few friends. (She was an only child; a sister had died before she was born.) As an adult, she used a wheelchair (after the death of her mother, who refused to allow her to have one). Writing cannot have been comfortable for her; but at her peak, she wrote 1800 words a day, by hand.
Once you know all this, a lot about her writing makes more sense. Tom Shakespeare lists nineteen of her novels where a major character has either a congenital or an acquired physical disability, and comments, “I cannot think of another writer who has done more or better.” And her disabled characters are not defined by their disabilities. They are simply people getting along as best they can in challenging circumstances. And it makes sense to choose Tom Shakespeare as the writer of the introduction to the book.
Sutcliff’s father was in the Navy, her mother was difficult (possibly bipolar) and her childhood was one of bouncing around between different ports, including Sheerness, Chatham and more exotically Malta. She was very slow to learn to read and write, left school at fourteen and worked as an artist until she rather suddenly became a full-time writer at the age of twenty-nine.
Having said all of that, it’s not a sad book. We live the life we get to live, and Sutcliffe makes the most of it, with occasional shafts of real humour. “I have always been sorry for children born more than two hundred years ago, and therefore denied the pleasure of popping fuchsia buds.” (This got some extraordinary responses when I posted it to Facebook.) She has a great eye for the countryside, and depicts friends and pets with love and candour. It’s a portrait of a particular time from a particular viewpoint, but it’s very nicely done.
In the last couple of chapters, she tells of her romantic relationship with Rupert King, a year younger than her but already separated from his first wife and the father of two sons. Eventually he decided to marry someone else, and she decided that she could not bear to be the third person in that relationship. It’s an intense and ultimately unhappy story, but she clearly feels that this thwarted romance was good for her in the end. I did a bit of my own delving on Rupert, using the online genealogy resources; he was married four times in all, with three more children on top of the two from his first marriage, and ended up in Australia. I don’t think he’d have made Rosemary happy in the medium to long term.
Anyway, brief, punchy, evocative, well worth it.
January 3, 2022
This book isn't for everyone. It is a very simple and personal memoir of Sutcliff's life up to the point she began to be a published author, not set amid momentous events or among harrowing adventures like many British memoirs during either of the great wars. If you're looking for plot, or broad themes of humanity, you will not find them here. What you will find, however, is a very touching, amusing, delicate portrait - like the miniatures she learned to paint - of a single soul who went through trying, if not tragic as she would be quick to point out, times as a child and young woman, yet manages to point out so very much that was good, and memorable, and yes, nostalgic, about those years. She has an incredible facility for picking out the relevant moments within the rolling of time, for describing the exquisite details that could so easily have been overlooked but which in actuality are necessary to compose the complete portrait of a memory, or a girl, much like the profusion of flowers she herself sees in the millefleurs unicorn tapestries in the Victoria and Albert Museum near the end of the book.
It is important to note that Sutcliff does not wallow in her disability. It is like any other aspect of a person's life that is simply one of the many ingredients that goes into making them who they are. For her, the trips to hospitals and doctors, and the limited mobility, become the opportunities to write about specific places or people she encountered as a result, which you might not find in another person's memoir, but which in essence are not different to her than the places and people another child might encounter at, say, sporting events would be to them in an athletic body. Whether, of course, that disability and its unique affect on a life helped mold her writing abilities, or whether we simply know about her disabilities because in fact she wound up a writer who could tell us, is impossible to know for certain. I think, however, that Sutcliffe leans towards the former.
Of course, one of the greatest strengths of this book is its ability to evoke time and place for the reader, in particular that important period after the first great war and through the end of the second, when England was sensing the loss, the fading from sight, of what it might feel was a more innocent and quiet time. In fact, it is near the very end of this book, in the later 1940s, when she and Rupert unexpectedly find an almost hidden, grassgrown rural lane barely wide enough for their car, through a tunnel of hazel bushes arching overhead, patched with sunshine, which lets them out onto a secret riverside meadow bedecked with elder-flowers where they simply while away the warm afternoon with a thermos of tea. "But if it was given me to live over again one afternoon of my life, that would be the one that I should choose."
That's the kind of memoir this book is. Indeed, as I finish writing these words, I am listening to Simon Mulligan on piano playing Ivor Novello's We'll Gather Lilacs , that "small, haunting, fragile hit-song" that was everywhere in the air during those final years, and I am in utter harmony with Sutcliff's sentiment, "What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia.”
It is important to note that Sutcliff does not wallow in her disability. It is like any other aspect of a person's life that is simply one of the many ingredients that goes into making them who they are. For her, the trips to hospitals and doctors, and the limited mobility, become the opportunities to write about specific places or people she encountered as a result, which you might not find in another person's memoir, but which in essence are not different to her than the places and people another child might encounter at, say, sporting events would be to them in an athletic body. Whether, of course, that disability and its unique affect on a life helped mold her writing abilities, or whether we simply know about her disabilities because in fact she wound up a writer who could tell us, is impossible to know for certain. I think, however, that Sutcliffe leans towards the former.
Of course, one of the greatest strengths of this book is its ability to evoke time and place for the reader, in particular that important period after the first great war and through the end of the second, when England was sensing the loss, the fading from sight, of what it might feel was a more innocent and quiet time. In fact, it is near the very end of this book, in the later 1940s, when she and Rupert unexpectedly find an almost hidden, grassgrown rural lane barely wide enough for their car, through a tunnel of hazel bushes arching overhead, patched with sunshine, which lets them out onto a secret riverside meadow bedecked with elder-flowers where they simply while away the warm afternoon with a thermos of tea. "But if it was given me to live over again one afternoon of my life, that would be the one that I should choose."
That's the kind of memoir this book is. Indeed, as I finish writing these words, I am listening to Simon Mulligan on piano playing Ivor Novello's We'll Gather Lilacs , that "small, haunting, fragile hit-song" that was everywhere in the air during those final years, and I am in utter harmony with Sutcliff's sentiment, "What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia.”
November 18, 2022
One of the loveliest books I've ever read in, except for my ancient pocket-hardback Oxford edition of Jane Eyre (bought, with great love and excitement, from a used book shop in St. Andrews), one of the loveliest editions I've ever possessed.
Rosemary Sutcliff made me a reader. When my 6th grade teacher, Miss Ostroff, handed me The Eagle of the Ninth, I read it, obsessively, for the rest of the school year. I still yearn for that tiny hardback edition with its black-and-white illustrations. It moved and excited me; it was, simply, alive: Marcus, his wolf-dog, the budding romance, the quest, the reconciliation with the past, the living with diminishment. It taught me what life was: accomplishments and losses. I went on, to read many more books, do a degree in literature, philosophy, history and then, an advanced one.
Now, 50 years later, in the middle of recovering from a felling flu, I read Blue Remembered Hills and was transported, again, by Sutcliff's remarkable sensibility. In her firm, quiet way, she tells us the story of her childhood and family, education, friendships, very few, so also of loneliness, a first and only love. If this was all, it would have been a beautifully written account indeed (with especial beauty to her descriptions of nature). It is more: Sutcliff confronted pain (physical and spiritual, of the heart and mind) and then, moved it aside, ever present, not ever dominant. Sutcliff teaches us: if pain is a Gordian knot, purpose, joy, beauty, and integrity are the sword. How she defines herself, through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood is a measured, subtle journey leading to her writing. Sutcliff's memoir is about how a precocious child, with a loving, not always-easy family, becomes a woman of deep aesthetic wisdom, a great writer, and steers the lives of many, including me.
Rosemary Sutcliff made me a reader. When my 6th grade teacher, Miss Ostroff, handed me The Eagle of the Ninth, I read it, obsessively, for the rest of the school year. I still yearn for that tiny hardback edition with its black-and-white illustrations. It moved and excited me; it was, simply, alive: Marcus, his wolf-dog, the budding romance, the quest, the reconciliation with the past, the living with diminishment. It taught me what life was: accomplishments and losses. I went on, to read many more books, do a degree in literature, philosophy, history and then, an advanced one.
Now, 50 years later, in the middle of recovering from a felling flu, I read Blue Remembered Hills and was transported, again, by Sutcliff's remarkable sensibility. In her firm, quiet way, she tells us the story of her childhood and family, education, friendships, very few, so also of loneliness, a first and only love. If this was all, it would have been a beautifully written account indeed (with especial beauty to her descriptions of nature). It is more: Sutcliff confronted pain (physical and spiritual, of the heart and mind) and then, moved it aside, ever present, not ever dominant. Sutcliff teaches us: if pain is a Gordian knot, purpose, joy, beauty, and integrity are the sword. How she defines herself, through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood is a measured, subtle journey leading to her writing. Sutcliff's memoir is about how a precocious child, with a loving, not always-easy family, becomes a woman of deep aesthetic wisdom, a great writer, and steers the lives of many, including me.
October 10, 2025
1983 Author born 1920, died 1992.
Enjoyable to read. Particularly interesting to me is the author's describing her mother's behavior towards her as a child, and at a few points an attempt at an explanation or analysis of her mother's psychology., esp. pp 123-125.
With a mother like that, perhaps it's sink or swim, and Sutcliff swam.
Her juvenile arthritis filled her childhood with operations, grueling treatments, and stays in institutions. She manages to weave that into her telling without it being the main point [which is also a point she wants to make: a person who happens to have a disability is also a person with feelings, desires, etc.].
I'd never heard of Sutcliff's many books written for children; this is often the case. Growing up in the U.S. we mostly are not much exposed to British literature, beyond the classics [Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens]. Esp. stories for children and young adults do not seem to make it over the Atlantic.
This memoir is an example of a book that presupposes [or leans on] the reader's familiarity with a great number of Britain place-names, institutions, schools, persons, customs. This makes it less accessible that it might otherwise be to readers who did not grow up in Britain. In fact, I suppose not many authors are able to write universally accessible stories, but a few are able to.
I enjoyed the following passage. The first sentence I find rather humorous and the second sentence is an example of what I just said about accessibility.
p 101:
"Most of us [in this school] were Wesleyan or United Methodist; I had been brought up in the lowest possible layer of the Church of England. Miss Davies [the headmistress] was an ardent Royalist in the Stuart sense of the word, and all roads led quite literally to King Charles's Head..."
One goodreader summed up this book so very well:
Enjoyable to read. Particularly interesting to me is the author's describing her mother's behavior towards her as a child, and at a few points an attempt at an explanation or analysis of her mother's psychology., esp. pp 123-125.
With a mother like that, perhaps it's sink or swim, and Sutcliff swam.
Her juvenile arthritis filled her childhood with operations, grueling treatments, and stays in institutions. She manages to weave that into her telling without it being the main point [which is also a point she wants to make: a person who happens to have a disability is also a person with feelings, desires, etc.].
I'd never heard of Sutcliff's many books written for children; this is often the case. Growing up in the U.S. we mostly are not much exposed to British literature, beyond the classics [Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens]. Esp. stories for children and young adults do not seem to make it over the Atlantic.
This memoir is an example of a book that presupposes [or leans on] the reader's familiarity with a great number of Britain place-names, institutions, schools, persons, customs. This makes it less accessible that it might otherwise be to readers who did not grow up in Britain. In fact, I suppose not many authors are able to write universally accessible stories, but a few are able to.
I enjoyed the following passage. The first sentence I find rather humorous and the second sentence is an example of what I just said about accessibility.
p 101:
"Most of us [in this school] were Wesleyan or United Methodist; I had been brought up in the lowest possible layer of the Church of England. Miss Davies [the headmistress] was an ardent Royalist in the Stuart sense of the word, and all roads led quite literally to King Charles's Head..."
One goodreader summed up this book so very well:
December 18, 2018
Admittedly, I haven't read much by Rosemary Sutcliff. But I mean to. I remember my first exposure to her writing vividly. I was in seventh grade and one of her short stories was in a large textbook that we read out of for Language Arts class. It was called "The Chief's Daughter". This very short story had a much deeper effect on me than I realized at the time. What captivated me about that little-known short story was her no-frills historical fiction that featured not adults, but children (preteen age in this case). I wanted to learn more about this author whom I had stumbled across at two very different points in my life. I soon found out she became disabled after battling juvenile arthritis, wrote dozens of books and had never married, all hallmarks of someone who must have lead a remarkable life, I thought. "Blue Remembered Hills" is an intimate account of the first 25 or so years of Sutcliff's life, written in her distinctly English, no-nonsense way. She doesn't hold herself aloof from the reader, and in fact, makes herself vulnerable in describing the ambiguous relationship with her mother who was her primary caregiver during her early years of illness and disability, her experiences with multitudes of doctors and medical procedures, her short-lived profession as a painter, and one ill-fated romance. I am grateful that she left this recollection of her early years for posterity. Given my history with Sutcliff's writing, I may be biased towards giving this book a five-star review, but I believe that anyone truly interested in the lives of twentieth-century figures or personal accounts of people with disabilities would enjoy this book.
February 1, 2023
This is such a lovely little book! I had never heard of Rosemary Sutcliff until I read her childhood memoir, but if she writes fiction as good as she writes nonfiction, then I have to track down more of her books.
I found the Slightly Foxed edition at Daunt Books in London and it sounded interesting so I bought it. I didn't expect to love it as much as I did though. This is such a beautiful memoir about Rosemary's childhood growing up as the daughter of a Navel captain before and during WWII. I especially loved the beginning when she describes the first years of her life in Malta. She remembers details from her five year old self so vividly and she tells the stories of her parents and childhood friends in a dreamlike way. Her sense of humor is delightful throughout and you eventually come to feel like you know these people and have stepped back in time. I also found her descriptions of growing up disabled interesting. She is very stoic about the multiple surgeries she had as a child and the battles she had with her mother learning how to walk. The best part of this book is that nobody treated her like she was disabled and she leads a fairly normal life. The memoir ends on a bittersweet note during her young adult years when she learns to funnel her loneliness into a new found love for writing and publishes her first novel.
I just adored this book and I can't wait to read more by this author. It was a sweet and nostalgic look into the past, and despite Sutcliff's health problems, one can't help but envy such an idyllic childhood.
I found the Slightly Foxed edition at Daunt Books in London and it sounded interesting so I bought it. I didn't expect to love it as much as I did though. This is such a beautiful memoir about Rosemary's childhood growing up as the daughter of a Navel captain before and during WWII. I especially loved the beginning when she describes the first years of her life in Malta. She remembers details from her five year old self so vividly and she tells the stories of her parents and childhood friends in a dreamlike way. Her sense of humor is delightful throughout and you eventually come to feel like you know these people and have stepped back in time. I also found her descriptions of growing up disabled interesting. She is very stoic about the multiple surgeries she had as a child and the battles she had with her mother learning how to walk. The best part of this book is that nobody treated her like she was disabled and she leads a fairly normal life. The memoir ends on a bittersweet note during her young adult years when she learns to funnel her loneliness into a new found love for writing and publishes her first novel.
I just adored this book and I can't wait to read more by this author. It was a sweet and nostalgic look into the past, and despite Sutcliff's health problems, one can't help but envy such an idyllic childhood.
March 13, 2024
In her gracious and moving 1983 memoir, the author of perennially-prized historical fiction for youth recounts the enchantments and trials of her own coming of age. The only child of an often absent naval officer and a domineering bipolar mother, Sutcliff spent much of her itinerant and increasingly isolated early life in and out of hospitals, undergoing surgeries and often arduous therapies for Still’s disease, a rare and debilitating form of juvenile arthritis. Sutcliff adresses these challenges with the brave resiliency of one of her books’ own heroes. She evokes the keenly-observed joys and wonders of her widening world with an unforced humor, warmth, and frankness, an unflagging bouyancy that carries the reader through the deeply piognant story of her gentle, doomed romance with a mercurial airman. The antithesis of so-called “misery lit,” this charming recollection captures the origins of an author who engaged her disability on her own terms, translating that experience into captivating narratives that continue to inspire countless young readers to this day.
July 18, 2022
I have known of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books rather than read them. I didn’t know about her physical disability and this memoir is about her early life where she was a crippled child in the parlance of the times, with long stays in hospitals with other crippled children and painful treatments and altogether a life protected and limited at least socially.
I found most of it trite and not really engaging. Easy to read but she had a childhood that was very restricted. Her mother was her companion and introduced her to the countryside and the flowers and fields.
But she writes movingly about a relationship with a young man when she was in her early twenties and I finished the book feeling quite differently about it. The relationship didn’t continue but she had no regrets and clearly felt that this filled out her life in a positive way.
She clearly found a vocation that used her talents when she became a much loved children’s writer. There was only a hint of this to come in the future at the end of this book.
I found most of it trite and not really engaging. Easy to read but she had a childhood that was very restricted. Her mother was her companion and introduced her to the countryside and the flowers and fields.
But she writes movingly about a relationship with a young man when she was in her early twenties and I finished the book feeling quite differently about it. The relationship didn’t continue but she had no regrets and clearly felt that this filled out her life in a positive way.
She clearly found a vocation that used her talents when she became a much loved children’s writer. There was only a hint of this to come in the future at the end of this book.
December 15, 2022
Rosemary Sutcliff concludes this memoir encompassing the first 25 years of her life with the statement that, at this point, she "...began to keep a diary. But of the years before the diary, all the years since the stork mistook our front door for Mrs. McPhee's, this is the only record."
Does that not sound like a hint...a teaser...that there would be at least one followup memoir one day? Like L.M. Montgomery, whose Emily of New Moon she adored, wouldn't Rosemary Sutcliff, in after years, have been quietly preparing her diaries for eventual publication?
She died barely ten years after Blue Remembered Hills was published. Was she caught by surprise? Had she not had time to edit her diaries? Are they shelved in some Rosemary Sutcliff Memorial Library somewhere, if there is one? Where are they?
Enquiring minds and admiring readers need to know.
Does that not sound like a hint...a teaser...that there would be at least one followup memoir one day? Like L.M. Montgomery, whose Emily of New Moon she adored, wouldn't Rosemary Sutcliff, in after years, have been quietly preparing her diaries for eventual publication?
She died barely ten years after Blue Remembered Hills was published. Was she caught by surprise? Had she not had time to edit her diaries? Are they shelved in some Rosemary Sutcliff Memorial Library somewhere, if there is one? Where are they?
Enquiring minds and admiring readers need to know.
January 18, 2025
Like many people, I have been reading Sutcliff books almost all ofmylife....I still have childhood copies of Eagle of the Ninth and Mark of the Horselord and more.
this autobiography is a delight...quietly, calmly written, understated text but fascinating and revealing, but it stops...there should be a second volume!
To be recommended
I have read this book before but re-reading it now (hence today's date on the "Read" file)reminds me of other hills and the nowledge that "we hear things among the heather"
this autobiography is a delight...quietly, calmly written, understated text but fascinating and revealing, but it stops...there should be a second volume!
To be recommended
I have read this book before but re-reading it now (hence today's date on the "Read" file)reminds me of other hills and the nowledge that "we hear things among the heather"
July 29, 2021
I have enjoyed several of Sutcliff's books and read her memoir with interest. She details her earliest childhood impressions, her complex relationship with her mother, her lackluster schooling, an ill-fated romantic involvement, her training as an artist, and her earliest attempts at writing. Woven throughout her recollections of the first 25 years of her life are the disability and many medical interventions she suffered resulting from Still's disease. All is related in her straightforward style, without a hint of self- pity. I really think her soul was warrior-class, which is why she wrote about ancient warlike characters with such insight.
(Read on openlibrary.org.)
(Read on openlibrary.org.)
November 7, 2022
This biography covers her first memories all the way to early adulthood, with a few references to her subsequent life. At times there is a bit too much detail, but all in all she paints a picture of what it was like to live through those times with her handicap. It was also interesting to learn how she came to be a writer.
January 7, 2020
I lovely memoir of her childhood and youth. This book takes us up to when she publishes her first book. It was interesting to peek into the daily life of people in the 1920s-40s. This book would really only appeal to Sutcliff fans.
April 20, 2020
A wonderful short autobiography. It was, however , too short. Did she write more of her own story? She is amazingly gracious with regard to others’ failings and surprisingly uncomplaining about her physical disadvantages. A delight.
February 12, 2019
A wonderful, brilliantly written memoir!
July 12, 2020
Loved this book. Definitely a keeper for me. Beautifully written and not maudlin.
March 7, 2022
I really enjoyed reading about the childhood of disability in the 1920s, though she left a lot unexplained about her treatments I would have been interested to read.
July 14, 2024
Delightful.
December 1, 2024
Like so many of these period personal memoirs, a very sweet evocation of times long gone, this one by a truly remarkable individual
Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews