Rosemary Sutcliff and the Magic of Childhood Reading

There is nothing more exciting than seeing children captivated by the magic of stories, and for many of us there’s no better children’s storyteller than Rosemary Sutcliff. Rebeka Russell, publisher of Manderley Press, joins us to share her enthusiasm for the author who inspired her love of literature at a young age and reads from her favourite of Sutcliff’s many books, The Armourer’s House.

Our second guest, Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: The History of Childhood Reading, then takes us into the enchanted world of children’s books and we discuss the importance of both childhood reading and reading to children. Sam’s insights into the development of stories, from oral storytelling to myths, legends, folklore and fairytales, are fascinating and explain how the endless retelling of stories lies at the core of children’s books.

The themes that run through such books (adventures, escape from the structure of adult life and facing the dangerous world on your own) resonate throughout Sutcliff’s work. Although she did not learn to read until she was 9, her mother read Celtic and Saxon legends to her, which fed her imagination and inspired her love of folklore and history. As a child Rosemary suffered from chronic juvenile arthritis and as a result was severely disabled. Like other authors with a difficult childhood, her books always feature a character who is different and is often left on the sidelines, and in her signature she incorporated a dolphin as a symbol of freedom. Initially trained as an artist and miniaturist, she had an extraordinary attention to detail which is reflected in her books’ vivid descriptions of both people and places.

From the perfection of her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (available from  Slightly Foxed) to her historical novels about the Roman occupation of Britain, the Dark Ages, and Norman and Tudor times, Sutcliff’s extraordinary imagination lives on in the canon of children’s writing.

This episode’s recommended reads were Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things, Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s autobiography A British Childhood and Susan Hill’s series featuring the detective Simon Serailler.