Promote your favorite Sutcliff book(s)!

[isis]

We're going to post the Sutcliff Swap rules and schedule, and open for sign-ups, Real Soon Now! But while you're waiting, why not squee about your favorite Sutcliff book in the comments here? This is your chance to remind others of that book they'd almost forgotten they'd loved, and inspire them to request or offer fanfiction or fanart for it. And if a book you haven't read sounds good to you, you can read it this summer and enjoy the fanworks created for it - and maybe you'll want to request it for Yuletide or Yuletart, or for next year's Sutcliff Swap. (Because this is going to be so much fun we will want to do it again!)

We're doing this on Dreamwidth only, so that we can use comment subject lines to identify the books we're talking about. If you don't have a Dreamwidth login, you can use OpenID or comment anonymously. ETA: anonymous commenting is now enabled! OpenID works too, which will email you comment replies. Please join in and promote your favorite Sutcliff books (this post has a list of all the books), and start thinking about what you might want to request and offer for the Sutcliff Swap!

Also, if you are intrigued by the descriptions of books you haven't read yet, you should be sure to join, not just watch, the community (at either site) so you can see locked posts. *cough*

Comments

Re: Blood Feud

[tryfanstone]

Hey. :)

In England?
- okay.

Thank you, very much, for the information. Think I can afford to give that one a miss...

And, yes, I think you're absolutely right (although in all honesty, I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned) that the emotions are sketchy - looking through this afternoon, I was seriously considering Thormod/Anders. Also, agreed to Alexia - she's definitely one of the more rounded younger female characters Sutcliff writes, and it's lovely to see her threaded through the book. (And... there's a whole other consideration there that I suspect you've already gone through in some detail, about women in Sutcliff.)

Re: Blood Feud

[carmarthen]

Yeah, that was my reaction. I guess maybe it was a budget thing, I dunno.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around Thormod/Justyn. Like, sure, I can totally buy it, and Justyn is loyal to Thormod...I just don't really understand why, hence desire for fic.

And... there's a whole other consideration there that I suspect you've already gone through in some detail, about women in Sutcliff.

I don't know which one you mean? I'm...conflicted...about how Sutcliff writes women, shall we say. I love a lot of her female characters as individuals, but the overall patterns kind of sadden me, and I get the impression they do not bother most other Sutcliff fans as much (or at all). And certainly the way she writes (or doesn't write) women contributes heavily to the slashiness of her books.

Re: Blood Feud

[tryfanstone]

Wry smile. All of them?

I don't know. I've been thinking about this one. Because, yes, Rosemary's Sutcliff's female characters can be... there's the fierce, dark-haired girl, the formidable, older woman: only in her adult novels, I think, do we get fully fleshed out female characters.

And it bothers me and doesn't. When I was younger, reading these for the first time, it never occured to me. In fact... to be honest, I really liked her lack of women: I wasn't interested in boarding schools or girl guides, and it was a huge relief not to have to bother.

Later, I did start to look for women in her books, and not find the characters I did want to read about. But it must have been the same for her - worse - when writing. There are very few *known* adventurous women, particularly in the time periods she wrote, and the books she read when she was lying in that bed doing nothing but reading and making up stories would have very few references. So... I have an awful lot of sympathy (obviously, as a writer) with her use of a male character to experience the world she's writing. I did go through a period when I was really annoyed with her for the lack, and then came full circle to an acknowledgement that I wasn't going to hold her to some modern standard that didn't apply either in the periods she writes or the period in which she was writing herself. I was going to enjoy the books as they stand, and if I wanted women doing amazing things, I would read other books about them, because I was lucky enough to have other books to read.

... um, yes. I had thoughts. ;)

Re: Blood Feud

[carmarthen]

I'm not sure this is the venue for a discussion of Sutcliff and female characters, so I'll try to be brief. a) I have pretty different issues about Sutcliff and women (mainly revolving around how she treats mothers and overtly sexual women, even in later books which she wrote well overlapped with the feminist movement and the rise of genre fiction with female protaginists) and b) I think a lot of it's a generational thing. I've noticed that younger Sutcliff fans, who grew up on narratives where women were fully present and often protagonists, tend to pick up on the same stuff that bugs me, and older Sutcliff fans who grew up identifying with male adventurers, tend to not have those issues.

Also, I don't think presenting a diversity of female characters sympathetically is incompatible with historical accuracy. History was full of women with different personality types who were loved by their family and friends. Since recorded history tends to focus on men of rank, power, and wealth, I think that's all the more reason for historical fiction--especially fiction like Sutcliff's, which doesn't usually focus on famous figures--to portray the rest of society. To some extent Sutcliff does that, but there are certain female types that I get the impression she had Issues with, and I'm not very comfortable with that. I think that's more of a product of the time she was writing in (and by the end of her career, earlier formed habits) than of the settings she wrote about.

(Although I am not saying I think Sutcliff should have written about anachronistic female adventurers, mind!)