Blue Remembered Hills

Blue Remembered Hills is Rosemary Sutcliff’s memoir of her childhood, youth and her first love affairs. It’s a classic of perfect writing about her close and not always easy relationship with her bipolar mother, life in the naval dockyards where her father was based, and the beloved family dogs, interspersed with her stoic endurance of physical and emotional pain. Sutcliff writes with joy about her fleeting childhood friendships in a lonely life as an only child. Her lyrical descriptions of the beauty around their remote house in Devon distract the reader from realising the excruciating clinical treatment Sutcliff underwent for years to repair the damage caused by Still’s Disease on her joints. She describes how her isolation and her awareness of being physically different informed some of her best-loved novels, as did her early love affairs.

Rosemary Sutcliff CBE (1920-92) went to art school at fifteen and became a talented painter, only turning to writing as a secret occupation for her private pleasure. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Member of the Royal Society of Miniaturists. Her first novels were published in 1950, and her most well- known success was The Eagle of The Ninth from 1954, the first of her novels about the Romans in Britain. She published over fifty novels for children and young adults and lived in Chichester, Sussex.