George Whyte-Melville: another Victorian literary influence on Sutcliff?

[smillaraaq]

As many of you Gentle Readers already know, the Usual Suspects behind this comm are prone to getting into long discussions about the names Sutcliff gave her characters, trying to identify their sources and picking them apart linguistically. Esca's name has been a particular puzzlement for all of us, because unlike so many of her other "Celtic"

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[carmarthen]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOT ENOUGH ! IN THE WORLD.

Well, well, well. I still think "Esca" works as a British name (and more appropriately to the period than just about anything else in her books except Cunorix and Cunoval and a couple others), but this seems like a much, much more likely source for Sutcliff to have found the name.

And it makes me wonder where THIS author got it from, especially since they don't seem to have realized that 'esca' is a perfectly good Latin word that would be a bizarre name to any Roman.

I am going to try to track down a copy of BRH; from what I've heard it doesn't talk about the writing of EOT9, but I will keep an eye out for mentions of Whyte-Melville.

IN CONCLUSION: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[smillaraaq]

Yeah, I'd love to see if there's anything out there where Sutcliff herself talks specifically about this book, but between the enslaved-British-prince-turned-gladiator Esca and his loyalty to an affectionate Roman master, the unsympathetic and effete Tribune Placidus, and the wealthy society matron Valeria, not to mention two of her favorite recurring hound names in the same passage, I think it's pretty safe to call this one a blatant influence! If the biographical article is to be believed Whyte-Melville is one of the authors Sutcliff's mother read to her when she was small, so there might be some mention of him in BRH.

And I simply do not have enough capslock and exclamation points in the world to express my glee at finding this. (Modified rapture only due to there being no clean human-proofread versions on Project Gutenberg yet, so I'm having to strain my eyes on scans straight from the original book -- the plaintext version is full of small but annoying OCR errors and the ereader conversions are even worse...)

[carmarthen]

*nods* Man, I can't believe she didn't even change the names more (!).

I want to read this so much. :-(

[smillaraaq]

They must have made a serious impression on her!

(I've now made it up to the first chapter with Esca's master Caius Licinus -- he's much more of an Uncle Aquila retired-officer type than a Marcus, more master-as-foster-father than master-as-bromantic-BFF. I am calling it for the record RIGHT NOW that I suspect Esca's mother will turn out to have been Licinus' lost British love Guenebra.)

[moonlightmead]

I have Blue Remembered Hills. It's wonderful. And I can't find it. Argh.

But when I do, I shall look.

[smillaraaq]

Thank you!

I really need to bite the bullet and just order a copy for myself one of these days -- every time I've stumbled across quoted passages from it online they've been incredible.

[hedgebird]

O_O. WOW. Find of the century, dude.

I just... don't really know what to make of her penchant for blatant references to other authors. It's like she not only wanted all of her own books to be consistent with each other, but with everyone else's as well.

I can get a library copy of Blue Remembered Hills. I don't remember Melville-Whyte, but since I don't know his work that wouldn't be surprising.

What's with the present tense? Uncommon in 19th century novels, surely?

[smillaraaq]

I'm kind of charmed by all the references -- it strikes me as such an endearingly fangirlish sort of thing to do, linking up her own universe with works that (at least in the case of Kipling for sure) she dearly loved. It's like epic multi-fandom crossover fic focused on original characters for the historical-adventure set!

[hedgebird]

Ahahaha, it really is. In fandom, of course, people would feel obligated to acknowledge their sources! But perhaps even Whyte-Melville, let alone Kipling, would've been quite obvious in the early fifties?

[smillaraaq]

Oh, I suspect she'd have thought the Kipling homages would have been fairly obvious. Hell, even in the US in the 1970s, I had no trouble coming across his stuff in bookstores and libraries, not to mention all the movie adaptations (even Disney!); I'd imagine that in the UK in the 1950s, his work would possibly have been even more familiar?

Whyte-Melville, I'm not so sure about -- if I can believe what little I'm finding online, The Gladiators seems to have been one of his most popular works, but I can find so very little about him, so few modern reprints of his work, etc., that I get the feeling his popularity didn't have the much-adapted, multigenerational endurance of someone like Dickens or Kipling or Stevenson. And I can kind of see why -- it's a very, very fusty-Victorian sort of story, more in the florid Bulwer-Lytton sort of vein. But Sutcliff's mother was clearly quite fond of that sort of historical potboiler, so perhaps Sutcliff might have thought of them as very familiar titles even if they were already going quite out of

[ext_505530]

I have a copy of Blue Remembered Hills in my hand ( or rather next to my computer). It's been years since I read it; I don't remember anything about EOT9, but I will begin a quick skimming re-read. I think there is mention of her early reading, but all I can remember is that she started readingEmily of New Moon while in hospital but left before she finished it and could not remember the title.

[ext_505530]

Got it, on page 54. Here is what she has to say about books read to her by her mother (she was slow to learn to read)

I was reared on a fine mixed diet of Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, Dickens , Stevenson, Hans Anderson, Kenneth Grahame and Kipling ..... Hero myths of Greece and Rome I had in an unexpurgated edition which my mother edited herself as she went along, and Norse and Saxon and Celtic legends. There were Whyte Melville's The Gladiators and Bulwer Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii and Weigal's Egyptian Princess; for my mother loved historical novesl-history of any kind, though her view of it was always more the minstrel's rather tan the historian's.

There's more about her early reading scattered throughout the book; it ends before she gets to her own writing.

[smillaraaq]

Oh, thank you so much for looking those up! <3 It's awesome to get that confirmation, and now I'm curious to check out the Weigal as well -- I've seen bits and pieces of the Bulwer-Lytton (including movie adaptations) but I've never heard of Egyptian Princess. And I've seen partial quotes of the bit you mention in your followup comment where she talks about Wild Sunrise being a bit too close to herself for publication, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone include the bit with the Whyte-Melville comparison. (Oh, what I wouldn't give to be able to read that early drawer-fic!)

[ext_505530]

Blue Remembered Hills is interesting to read for a view of a specific writer in development. Clearly her parents had a lot to do with the writer she became; a dramatic mother and supportive father who had a lot of military friends. Her physical problems and their treatment gave her much more that knowledge of disability from the inside - there's quite a bit about being a child in hospital with a lot of others, and finding her way among them. I'm sure a lot of her character development started there. She also had a love affair - probably no sex but certainly a deep connection - that she acknowledges made her able to write as she did. Those deep friendships in her YA books have a source.

[smillaraaq]

*nods nods*

If you wouldn't mind looking up one other thing unrelated to her early reading, I've seen a few passages quoted online mentioning the family pets; does the book give much detail on what breeds/types of dogs she had, or was familiar with from friends and neighbors? I know that in her later adult life she had chihuahuas, but I'm quite curious as to what other sorts of dogs she was familiar with -- she writes them so well.