Sutcliff, Rosemary - John Rowe Townsend

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, 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 its sense of movement on all these scales. Bright the surface may be, and vigorous the action of the moment, but it is never detached from the forces underneath that give it meaning. She puts more into the reader's consciousness than he is immediately aware of.

She is not—in terms of the novel in general rather than of the children's list—a fashionable writer, or even very well known…. It may be that Miss Sutcliff's virtues are not fundamentally a...

[The entire page is 1733 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass