Sutcliff, Rosemary - Neil Philip

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 in her treatment of the theme of male comradeship provided the most sensitive and sustained representation of male homosexual feeling in children's literature.

The main body of her work, the sequence of major novels ranging from the Bronze Age Warrior Scarlet, through the great Roman trilogy (published in one volume as Three Legions) to the eleventh century Knight's Fee, is a magnificent achievement. To call the books historical novels is to limit them disgracefully; the very phrase implies a deadness … and a distancing which is the opposite of her intention. She does not bring "history" to the reader, but involves the reader in the past—not just for the duration of a book, but for ever. She can animate the past, bring it to life inside the reader in a...

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