Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection in Operation Read All the Sutcliff

Sep 29, 2013 Dorothea rated it it was amazing

This is the best book I've read in months.

I wasn't expecting that at all when I checked it out from the library yesterday. I've read a few of Sutcliff's novels. But I only started Blue Remembered Hills, her memoir, because after The Shield Ring I wanted to know what, if anything, she'd written about her own disability.

She did indeed write a lot about her disability. (She developed juvenile arthritis at age two, underwent regular surgeries and treatments throughout her childhood and adolescence, This is the best book I've read in months.

I wasn't expecting that at all when I checked it out from the library yesterday. I've read a few of Sutcliff's novels. But I only started Blue Remembered Hills, her memoir, because after The Shield Ring I wanted to know what, if anything, she'd written about her own disability.

She did indeed write a lot about her disability. (She developed juvenile arthritis at age two, underwent regular surgeries and treatments throughout her childhood and adolescence, and was never able-bodied.) Here's a bit I liked, from her teens:

I could, in fact, walk reasonably well; and my mother was determined that I should be able to walk two miles. If you could walk two miles, she said, you could get to most places you needed to go. Actually, this is a fallacy. The fact that you can, with great difficulty, and taking an unconscionable time about it, walk two miles, will not get you anywhere you need, or at any rate want, to go. There were times when a wheelchair would have added another dimension to my life, but that was a forbidden subject; and it was not until many, many years later, long after my father and I were alone, that I took the law into my own hands and bought one; and instantly, dazzled with the new freedom that it bought me, swept my father off to his old haunts on an Hellenic cruise.

There are other bits I wanted to quote, but to keep this post to a reasonable length (and to encourage you to read the book yourself if you are curious) I will just say that to my untrained eye, what Sutcliff says about physical disability (she said little about any other kind) would not be out of place in a Blogging Against Disablism blog carnival.

What else did she write about? Well, she was born in 1920, published this book in 1983, and died in 1992. To my intense regret, she ended the memoir with the publication of her first books in 1950. So she didn't write about more than half of her life! In the last paragraph she says that while Blue Remembered Hills is the only record of her life before she became a published author, soon after that she began to write a diary. I really hope that it's around still in some library collection, because I would very much like to read it someday (or, at least, for someone to write a proper biography of her, but her own words would be best).

She wrote in Blue Remembered Hills about her childhood and, less, about her adolescence--an only child, with an overly-invested, dramatic, needy mother (the bit about the two miles is quite typical) and a father in the Navy, thus frequently absent. They lived briefly in Malta, then returned to England, to vividly-remembered flowers, a circuit of hospitals, uncles and aunts, dogs, and books. She left school at fourteen and went to art school; her contribution during the war was to paint designs on canvas to send to prisoners of war so that they could make tapestries. At her parents' encouragement, she began a career as a miniaturist; though she was good at this, her frustration at the limitations of miniature-painting led her to begin writing in secret.

I'm not conveying what makes this such a good book, though. Let me give you a bit more of it.

Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. It was a boarding-school world [...]

In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana ...'

But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but one could only act Lilian and Diana; we could not be them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too...

I would also like to show you something from the end, about a relationship she was in, and what happened to it. But I can't just quote it. That part builds up from early on in the book, from what she's said about about her family dynamics, and loneliness, and how she and her family and English society in the 1940s thought about her disability. It is complex and humane and sad in a way that utterly defies pity. ...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Nicky rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, about-writing

Rosemary Sutcliff's autobiography mainly covers the years before she began to write, though of course the experiences recorded here were formative ones. Mostly, she writes about her parents, and her struggles with disability.

It's pretty fascinating to hear about her childhood, to guess at how this or that was linked to her writing. There's always something warm about Rosemary Sutcliff's writing, even when she's talking about battles and the like, and that's present here too. She accepts a lot of ...more

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Jun 28, 2012 Sea rated it really liked it

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Jun 04, 2014 Stephen rated it it was amazing

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