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 novelist's virtues. The novel is much more concerned with individual character and day-to-day living than were the ancient forms that came before it. Rosemary Sutcliff's work is rooted more in myth, legend and saga than in the English novel.

She was a slow starter. The promise of her early books was not outstanding. The Queen Elizabeth Story (1950), The Armourer's House (1951) and Brother Dusty-Feet (1952) were innocuous, episodic historical stories for quite young children of perhaps eight to eleven. The backgrounds were already solid, and the storytelling, as distinct from story-construction, was already effective. In each case the story covers a period of many months, and the chapters are strung like beads on a thread; they do not often rise out of each other…. [There] is no real life in any of them. The atmosphere is almost cosy; as it is, too, in the retold Chronicles of Robin Hood, published in 1950…. The tone of voice is sometimes condescending, and simplicity can sink into naïvety or be misleading, as, for instance, in the presentation of the life of a company of strolling players as one of innocent good-fellowship.

Simon (1953) has an English Civil War setting and is a transitional book. Miss Sutcliff is writing for an older age-group and with more complexity. The action, as in so many later books, is spread over several years. Simon is not to my mind a success. It gives the impression that a good deal of military history has been imperfectly transposed into fiction; the conflict of loyalties in a friendship that cuts across the civil-war lines is rather obvious, and the hero a dull fellow. (pp. 193-94)

Miss Sutcliff's big C-major theme comes in with The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). This book is perhaps more of a complete novel, more satisfying in itself, than any other of her books so far; yet at the same time it is the first stage in a complex construction of which a great deal of her later work can be said to form part.

There are three 'Roman novels', the second and third being The Silver Branch (1957) and The Lantern Bearers (1959); but the break between the Roman books and their successors really comes early in The Lantern Bearers, when the galleys leave Britain and the hero, Aquila, though a Roman citizen and officer, decides to stay in the small benighted island where he was born. The theme, as Margaret Meek pointed out in her Bodley Head monograph on Rosemary Sutcliff [see excerpt above], is 'the light and the dark'. In The Lantern Bearers the light is carried, weak and guttering, into the darkness. The events of this book are followed by those of the adult novel Sword at Sunset (1963) where Arthur is presented as a British war leader fighting a doomed rearguard action against the invading hordes. In Dawn Wind (1961) the theme and the metaphor are extended; there is not only 'the last gleam of a lantern far behind', but there is also 'the hope of other light as far ahead' in the prospect of a union of Briton and Saxon in the Christian faith.

But 'the light and the dark' is not the only theme; nor does it cover all that the author thinks and feels about civilization and barbarism. An overriding subject, extended over many books, is the making of Britain. This goes back to the Bronze Age in Warrior Scarlet (1958); and forward to The Shield Ring (1956), in which Norseman meets Norman, and Knight's Fee (1960) where the Norman Conquest is over and Normans too are beginning to lose themselves in a common identity. And Miss Sutcliff moves sideways, as it were, from Roman Britain in The Mark of the Horse Lord (1965), in which Phaedrus the Gladiator first impersonates, then becomes identified with, the leader of the Gaelic 'horse people'. Peoples mix, conquerors are absorbed, and all along, timeless and patient, from Warrior Scarlet right through to Knight's Fee two thousand years later, are the Little Dark People, who endure and survive.

Miss Sutcliff's link with Kipling—especially of Puck of Pook's Hill—is well known and acknowledged, and in this theme of continuity it is seen at its strongest. Continuity is emphasized by the recurrence of symbolic objects: the flawed emerald ring in the Roman novels, and in Sword at Sunset and Dawn Wind; the silver branch in the book to which it gives its name and also in Sword at Sunset and The Mark of the Horse Lord; the weathered flint axe-head, found on the Downs, that links Randal in Knight's Fee with Drem, right back in Warrior Scarlet. And 'the light and the dark' is not a division between good and bad. Just as Kipling, a man of the West, could respect and appreciate the different values of the East (see especially Kim), so Miss Sutcliff, who strikes me as a rather Roman writer herself, can understand qualities which from a Roman point of view might be called barbarian. (pp. 194-96)

The last great Sutcliff theme, again running through all the major books, is at the most basic level of all. This is death and rebirth as a condition of the continuance of life. Appropriately, this is most explicit in Warrior Scarlet, the earliest book in its subject-matter. (p. 196)

A further preoccupation of Miss Sutcliff, which gives her books their special relevance for young people but nevertheless goes far beyond any such sectional appeal, is that of the proving of the hero. This theme recurs so often that I need not link it with a succession of titles. It seems to me that this is part of the major theme just mentioned. It is necessary to come through a testing ordeal in order to die as a boy—or unproved man—and be reborn as man and warrior. Nearly all Miss Sutcliff's heroes are warriors. They are also leaders, and two of them are, for practical purposes, kings. Leadership has its price, and the greater the leadership the greater the price. It is the duty and privilege and ultimate glory of a king to die that his people may flourish. So die Arthur in Sword at Sunset and Phaedrus in The Mark of the Horse Lord. We are in the shadow of the Golden Bough. (p. 197)

Although it is not too difficult to find differences among Rosemary Sutcliff's heroes, they nevertheless seem to me to be from the same mould. They are brave but not reckless, thoughtful but limited, conscientious, reliable, true to their friends, stiff-upper-lipped. They face and overcome their difficulties, though not with ease. They are not gay or dashing; they suggest the Service officer rather than the independent adventurer, or—however humble their origins may be—the common man. They are not artists, and one feels that although they would try dutifully to appreciate the worth of the artist they would never enter his world. There is a revealing sentence at the end of Knight's Fee when the minstrel Herluin, though indebted to the hero Randal for his freedom, thinks it 'more than likely' that he would find life dull with Randal on his Downland manor. The reader may well agree. Some of the Sutcliff heroes are unexciting, though worthy….

The fiery girls who make up Miss Sutcliff's little band of feminine characters are thinly sketched, and only just exist as people. Her villains, major and minor, come straight from stock; her most notable successes in characterization may well be her tetchy old men. She rarely practises the novelist's art of building up tension towards a single climax, and she is not above making excessive use of coincidence.

Yet there can be few writers who cope anything like so well as she does with the passage of time, who can speed or slow up the narrative so effortlessly as it leaves or arrives at its significant points. Miss Sutcliff's writing is highly pictorial. At the same time she has a splendid gift for the stirring account of swift action, and she can combine these qualities most effectively. (p. 198)

There is a great deal of violent action in her books, but it is never meaningless violence, violence for violence's sake, violence that in the end defeats itself and deadens the reader's response. Always one has a sense of what it is all about. At the same time there is little that is abstract, and there are no painstaking and lifeless reconstructions. For Rosemary Sutcliff the past is not something to be taken down from the shelf and dusted. It comes out of her pages alive and breathing and now. (p. 199)