Rosemary Sutcliff--Warrior and Beautiful Spirit

English author Rosemary Sutcliff died thirty-three years ago this month, on July 23, 1992. She was seventy-one years old, and she had, over the course of her life, written dozens of books for--as she put it--"children of all ages, from nine to ninety."

I first discovered Rosemary Sutcliff when I was eight or nine, in a book that was a gift from my late Auntie Pat: The Eagle of the Ninth. It's probably Sutcliff's most famous book, and has undergone--for better or worse--many adaptations on television and in film. Once I'd read it, I was hungry for more, and eagerly lapped up the subsequent novels in the series about Roman Britain.

Sword at Sunset is a more "adult" tome, both in tone and in length, and is Sutcliff's interpretation of the King Arthur legend.

Others of her novels, many of which I've read, encompass events of the English Civil War, stories of the Jacobites, the history of pre-Roman Britain, and her retellings of the Iliad and the Odyssey (with drawings by famed Tolkien illustrator Alan Lee). And there are plenty more. The woman was a history maven, retelling in imaginative detail many of the touchstone and benchmark events of Western Civilization, often those dealing with political, military, and even romantic details that--had she been a less talented writer--would have bored her often-young readership senseless. I won't say she got every scintilla historically correct, but, in the main, if a person relied on Rosemary Sutcliff for historical knowledge, he or she couldn't go far wrong overall.

What I didn't know about her until a couple of days ago, when I chanced across the information that the 33rd anniversary of her death was coming up, was that Rosemary Sutcliff--who was born in 1920 to a Royal Navy officer and his wife, and who spent her childhood in the peripatetic way that so many "military brats" do--was severely disabled by Juvenile-Onset Still's Disease (a rare subtype of juvenile idiopathic arthritis with which she was diagnosed at age two). She spent almost all her life in pain and in a wheelchair. She credited her love and knowledge of history to her mother, who would occupy her childhood time with stories of Celtic and Roman Britain when the young Rosemary was unable to do much else except listen.

Never would I have imagined that the author of the books I so loved as a child and young adult could have been written by a person in such pain, and of such limited personal experience with many of the subjects she wrote about. She's a humbling testament to the power of the human imagination and the good that a person can do when she sets her own needs aside and embarks on a career of delighting others.

Rosemary Sutcliff never married. She had no children.

And yet.

Here I am. Along with--I suspect--millions more over the decades.

Thank you, Rosemary Sutcliff. May your stories about the best parts of Western Civilization continue to serve as inspiration for generations to come.

Rest in peace.