But—will you e'er forget the scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?
D. K. Broster's The Flight of the Heron (1925) is indeed a more complex novel than The Wounded Name (1922) and almost as damn-the-subtext slashy—it's not difficult to see one as a dry run for the other, although they differ substantially in the ending and I am not getting over the incredibly gay string of classical allusions in the earlier novel any time soon. This one piles on not just the loyalty and the hurt/comfort but the conflicted pursuit of honor between heart and duty in ways that occasionally and unexpectedly gave me flashbacks to some elements of Turn (2014–2017). The latter were not unwelcome, but I don't consider them statistically significant; they may be a side effect of emotionally twisty narratives set between rebellion and empire. Conversely, I am indebted to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nineweaving for confirming the lineage between Broster and Rosemary Sutcliff with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since after one novel of Broster's I was suspicious, but after two I was willing to buy a hat to eat if Sutcliff hadn't read her. I have found myself saying recently that Broster feels like a bright body in a constellation of writers I was raised on, but it took me until now to see her. I feel like I could end up with a research project on my hands if I'm not careful.
It was strange, it was alarming, to feel, as by this time he did, how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication—like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.
(Slash goggles continue to be superfluous.)
nineweaving for confirming the lineage between Broster and Rosemary Sutcliff with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since after one novel of Broster's I was suspicious, but after two I was willing to buy a hat to eat if Sutcliff hadn't read her. I have found myself saying recently that Broster feels like a bright body in a constellation of writers I was raised on, but it took me until now to see her. I feel like I could end up with a research project on my hands if I'm not careful.It was strange, it was alarming, to feel, as by this time he did, how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication—like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.
(Slash goggles continue to be superfluous.)
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Ah, so Sutcliff did read Broster! That similarity had also occurred to me, and it's great to have it confirmed. (And, returning to the 'did they mean it like that' question, it's certainly a possibility Sutcliff was aware of for her characters, given the canon m/m relationship in Sword at Sunset).
I feel like I could end up with a research project on my hands if I'm not careful.
Sounds like a great idea :D
And that line about the trees is one of my favourites—aww, Keith...
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It's more equal in complication on both sides; the idtastic is more subordinated to the story; the political research is still meticulous, but the cast of characters is wider and the sense of place is much stronger. Also the main female character still exists as a point of mediation between the two men, but she has a lot more of a personality and I personally appreciate the absence of jealousy regarding her bond with one of the men, which in The Wounded Name was valuable as a gauge of Laurent's emotions and otherwise I could have done without.
Ah, so Sutcliff did read Broster! That similarity had also occurred to me, and it's great to have it confirmed.
Sutcliff feels like the closest descendant of my acquaintance, although it is very likely that there are others, especially since it's been more than a half-century since she started publishing, this sentence derailed by my remembrance of Megan Whalen Turner, who not only nicked the dolphin ring for her own classically-inspired worldbuilding, she has acknowledged The Eagle of the Ninth as the model for one of her later novels, in which the m/m is textual. I don't remember her citing Broster among her influences, but she got her at least secondhand, and she did cite writers like Orczy, MacLean, Dunnett, so she's in the right vicinity. Huh. I really need to read the conclusion to that series. I have been following it for literally twenty-five years now.
(And, returning to the 'did they mean it like that' question, it's certainly a possibility Sutcliff was aware of for her characters, given the canon m/m relationship in Sword at Sunset).
Agreed. Also, she is another writer where in some instances I don't see how they couldn't.
And that line about the trees is one of my favourites—aww, Keith...
It feels characteristic of both Keith and the novel that that simile ends with him deciding that the roots of their intimacy must be severed and the scene ends with him cutting a lock of Ewen's hair.
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It feels characteristic of both Keith and the novel that that simile ends with him deciding that the roots of their intimacy must be severed and the scene ends with him cutting a lock of Ewen's hair.
Aargh—oh dear, you're right. </3
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The first novel is effectively a YA caper with some wider implications set in a well-drawn secondary world influenced by classical and late antique history. The series took a serious level in emotional and political complexity with the second novel—I have traditionally classed these books with the fiction of Elizabeth E. Wein, if that helps as a reference—and nothing I have heard about the final volume suggests it dropped back. The Sutcliff-inspired one is Thick as Thieves (2017). I have no idea how it would read on its own, as it picks up characters from previous books and turned out to be the penultimate in the series, but I loved it.
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That's it! I admit to being curious what the author will do next, but really should read the last book before I start speculating.
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Historical inaccuracies and all, I really love The Eagle of the Ninth (1954)! Which is very, shall we say, not un-slashy. We had a first edition in the house when I was growing up, but everything else of hers I got out of the library, which meant I had no idea the dolphin ring ran through an entire series. I just kept finding it turning up, like archaeology. And breathtakingly intense male friendships.
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I am not getting over the incredibly gay string of classical allusions in the earlier novel any time soon
I wish I was better at classical allusions and Latin citations, I feel it's a limitation in my fic-writing. Ah well.
One writer who I feel is not in the Jacob/Broster/Renault/Sutcliff lineage (if one can call it that), despite living in the same time period and writing historical books that have same-sex relationships in them, is Naomi Mitchison. I mean, I love her books dearly, but despite occasionally portraying same-sex relationships, they are not at all slashy IMO. Some of the differences in writing may be because Mitchison was a socialist (not that one can't combine socialism and slashiness). I mean, I don't explicitly know Broster's political opinions, but I am 110% sure she was not a socialist. All those French royalists probably do say something about her opinions, even if she probably also wrote them because they offered tragic and honour-laden storylines. And Renault was, um, definitely not a socialist. No idea about Sutcliff.
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It had just been so long, I'd gotten out of the habit of having my favorite characters die!
One thing I really like about the book is how it offers both sides of the historical conflict--there's Keith being less than impressed by the Jacobites, Ewen's loyalty and idealism, Keith's horror at what his own side is doing at the end even as he still doesn't sympathize with the other side politically...it's just a really good set-up for the enemies-to-lovers plot and offers a lot of opportunity for fic.
Yes. And pleasantly nuanced after the ride-or-die royalism of The Wounded Name, which offers one honorable enemy in the person of Colonel Richard and otherwise has little in favor of the Imperalists. Ewen is never less than whole-heartedly for the Jacobite cause, but the narrative can be critical of the Bonnie Prince he dedicates himself to. It's another level in characterization that makes the world feel more real.
I wish I was better at classical allusions and Latin citations, I feel it's a limitation in my fic-writing. Ah well.
I am happy to supply classical allusions if you'd find it useful. I have done it professionally.
One writer who I feel is not in the Jacob/Broster/Renault/Sutcliff lineage (if one can call it that), despite living in the same time period and writing historical books that have same-sex relationships in them, is Naomi Mitchison.
I have been considering Naomi Mitchison! Sylvia Townsend Warner, too, who was again queer and wrote historical novels with queer relationships. (Jill Paton Walsh feels too late to be considered as part of the same constellation; on the other hand, her publication dates overlap Sutcliff's and her ancient world owed a visible debt to Renault. If you have not read Farewell, Great King (1972), I apologize for the ten-year-old style of my review, but it shouldn't reflect on the novel, which I still need to own a copy of.) I feel less inclined to chalk it up to differences in politics than differences in id, or perhaps what each was using the historical form for. Mitchison was a lot more interested in women, as characters and historically, than Sutcliff or Renault or, so far for me, Broster.
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Oh, cool. Thanks for the offer!
Yes, I like Sylvia Townsend Warner, too (in fact for Yuletide this year I wrote a crossover between a Mitchison book and a Townsend Warner book). But I've never read Jill Paton Walsh, so thanks for the rec! I do agree that slashiness or otherwise is id, not politics, though politics can of course influence what one writes about otherwise.
Mitchison was a lot more interested in women, as characters and historically, than Sutcliff or Renault or, so far for me, Broster.
Yes, definitely! Broster has some books with stronger female characters than the ones you've read, but overall she's a lot more interested in men.
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I trained as a classicist. I try to use my powers for good.
(in fact for Yuletide this year I wrote a crossover between a Mitchison book and a Townsend Warner book)
AAAAAAAAAAH.
But I've never read Jill Paton Walsh, so thanks for the rec!
You're welcome! She was a prolific author of contemporary and historical fiction in multiple periods and turned out to have written a pair of formative picture books from my childhood; I gravitated mostly toward her classical work, but everything I have read of hers—aside from the Sayers continuations, of which I found the first an interesting experiment and noped hard out of the second and the rest—has been well-done and worthwhile. Skip A Parcel of Patterns (1983) if you are not feeling up for a retelling of the self-quarantine of Eyam during the Great Plague of London in 1665, though.
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I loved it when I read it, and in ten years I've still never seen it in a used book store. I hope you can find it readily and enjoy!
(I understand the experiment of completing Thrones, Dominations, since Sayers had at least left the ending of that one, but I wouldn't have tapped Paton Walsh for it and I wouldn't have gone on afterward. She should be better known for everything else.)
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Thank you for believing in me!
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"My father's was Sir Christopher Cradoc, who went down at Coronel in 1916. My father was his pilot, and would have gone down with him but for a last-minute transfer. Sir Christopher Cradoc wore steel-boned corsets and used scent. He used regularly to arrive on the bridge when my father was bringing the ship into harbour, and say 'Thirty seconds late, Pilot,' to which my father would reply, 'Sir, kindly get off my bridge, you are upsetting my compass.' Years later, when I came to know about such things, I said to my father, 'Was he a homosexual?' My father looked at me with clear surprised eyes, and said, 'No, just Elizabethan, like Drake and Raleigh.'"
"Upsetting my compass"! Indeed.
Nine
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I had no idea she had named Cradoc of The Eagle of the Ninth after a person more recent than the first century CE.
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I love how she slips that homage in, invisibly.
Nine
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The ever-useful ODNB:
"The term 'knightly' was easily applied to this very model of a late Victorian naval officer who never married. Tall, alert, and always immaculately dressed with a neatly trimmed beard, the well-spoken Cradock had a reputation as a fine sportsman and seaman. As commander in the Royal Naval College Britannia in 1895 he reminded the future Admiral Andrew Cunningham of Sir Francis Drake. Cradock also published, notably Sporting Notes in the Far East (1889) followed by Wrinkles in Seamanship (1894). His best-known work was Whispers from the Fleet (1907), a series of anecdotes and maxims providing common-sense advice for young officers that would also be carefully examined by historians after his death for possible explanations of his motives."
Nine
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Indeed! Nice eyes. And nicknamed "Kit," I see, as an Elizabethan Christopher should be.
Per Philip Burton's "Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth: A Festival of Britain?" which I will fetch off JSTOR for you if necessary:
"In Blue Remembered Hills, Sutcliff recounts how her first novel, Wild Sunrise, was 'a saga of the Roman invasion of Britain, told from the British viewpoint. Its hero, Cradoc, was a young British chieftain, as Victorian-English as anything out of Whyte Melville's Gladiators.' This Cradoc himself seems to have had complex roots. Welsh mythology knows several Caradocs, and the name is often taken to be the same as that of Caratacus, son of Cunobelinus, the hero of the Catuvellauni's resistance to Claudius' invasion of Britain. This would certainly make sense in the context of Sutcliff's Wild Sunrise, though of course the action of The Eagle is set some ninety years later. The sixth-century King Cerdic of Wessex seems to have borne a Anglicized version of the name. The Welsh connection also takes us into Arthurian cycle, and the First Continuation to Chrétien of Troyes' Perceval contains a Livre de Caradoc, describing the adventures of two Sir Caradocs. Finally, at least one Cradoc was important in Sutcliff's own family circle: her naval-officer father had, before she was born, been pilot to Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock (Cradoc in her spelling), who, as she presents it, had 'inspire[d] hero-worship in one young navigating officer that lasted him the rest of his life' . . . These dislocations in time and place are, I suggest, important for our reading of The Eagle as a whole. Guenevere the wife of Arthur is, in some sense, the regal, mysterious wife of Cradoc. Cradoc the resistance leader is the Caratacus who fought against Rome nearly a century before – and also the Sir Christopher Cradock with whom Sutcliff's father served."
The article is an painstakingly detailed look at the acknowledged and identifiable influences and allusions in the novel—of which I get to feel smug about catching most of the Kipling shout-outs, though I missed the neon sign of "The Lost Legion" (1892)—which then goes on to consider how they work together to form a broader resonance in the traditions of both imperial and post-war literature. Her red-haired pilot of whom you told me, battle-fatigued out of the RAF, is considered part of the pattern, too, although the author does not link him to wounded Marcus and that's the first thing that would have occurred to me.
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I don't actually see how it follows.
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*CLANG*
I wish you'd have told me you'd taken to pinning your hair up. Are you using all the bronze ones from Kameiros that one time?
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The bone ones don't give off quite the same ring.
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Broster is not, er, dicking around.
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(I love Sutcliff and her very-not-subtle slashy subtext)
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What was or wasn't working for you? (I enjoyed it straight through, despite the slightly lesser degree of sheer id than The Wounded Name.)
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I imprinted on Keith almost at once, which I suspect helped. And it may not be your sort of thing! But I would consider it worth re-trying before wandering permanently off.
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Your vote is noted and appreciated.
and significantly older me did consider quite strongly naming my son either Keith or Windham in homage (you can tell who my favourite character was.
I mean, same.
And I ultimately decided against it, but he does have a Scottish name
My brother was almost named after one of my mother's favorite characters. He ended up named after a different favorite character instead.