Blue Remembered Hills

   

    Rosemary Sutcliff's Blue Remembered Hills, her account of her childhood and early adulthood first published in 1983, is a gentle, wistful memoir of acceptance.

    Physically disabled and subjected to painful treatment over many years, she is uncomplaining and seems to have borne the limitations her condition imposed on her with grace. An only child with few friends her own age, her relative isolation and resulting reserve seem to have afforded her a degree of maturity and a self-reliant focus which must have influenced and informed her writer's sensibilities. A love affair which never could have had a satisfactory future, far from being a source of regret, is recalled with joy for the treasured memories which remained when it was over. "I was happy with rather pathetically little," she says of another romantic attachment, but she could be referring to many other aspects of her life.

    Born in 1920, the daughter of a naval man, Rosemary's early years were spent in dockyards in England and Malta before the family moved to North Devon, to an idyllic-sounding setting for a novelist to grow up in. But it was painting in which she first made her mark, attending art school, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, becoming known as a miniaturist, acknowledging, though, that that career path was taken on the advice of her "elders and betters", and "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."

      "I suppose it must have been around the middle of the war that I began to get the itch to write." So she began in secret, "at first purely for the pleasure of scribbling," then as forbidden delight and means of escape. She admits to embarrassment at her early attempts at story-telling - derivative, whimsical products of inexperience - but went on to attempt a re-telling of Celtic and Saxon legends which she gave to an old friend, a gentleman with connections, who passed them to an acquaintance at the Oxford University Press. By and by, OUP wrote to say that they did not want her British legends, but would she try her hand at writing a Robin Hood for them? "That was how it all began."

    The book reveals Rosemary Sutcliff's humour, a gift for making the best of things, a person at peace with herself. I'd love to know about her later life, what the success of her books meant to her, whether she achieved personal satisfaction beyond the level of stoic acceptance; on the basis of this fine memoir I very much hope that she did.

Comments

[Readerlane]

After reading Blue Remembered Hills a few years ago, I too wondered about Ms Sutcliffe’s subsequent life as a writer. A second volume would have been nice, but I guess she had other writing priorities.

[Cornflower]

Indeed.

[Fran]

I learnt more early history through reading Rosemary Sutcliffe than anything taught at school. Such a wonderful story teller. I didn’t realise she had overcome so much physical suffering and poor health until I was much older which just heightened my regard for her. Growing up in the 60’s I look back now and see what a rich seam of historical story telling was available to children.

[Cornflower]

Very much so.