Author

Rosemary Sutcliff

1920-1992 · English author of historical fiction set largely in Roman and early Britain

About Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920–1992) was an English writer of historical fiction for young readers and adults. Still's disease, a form of juvenile arthritis, limited her mobility from early childhood, and she was schooled largely at home, where her mother read aloud to her, before training as a painter of miniatures. She turned to writing in the late 1940s, and The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) was her breakthrough. It became the first of a loose sequence of Roman and post-Roman British novels linked by a family signet ring, including The Silver Branch (1957), The Lantern Bearers (1959, Carnegie Medal) and Frontier Wolf (1980). She also retold the Iliad and Odyssey for children in Black Ships Before Troy (1993) and The Wanderings of Odysseus (1995).

Notable works

On this site

The Eagle of the Ninth

Rosemary Sutcliff

1954 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel

Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.

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