Blue Remembered Hills : A Recollection Book

Recently I read "The Silver Branch," a novel by Sutcliff. I liked it very much and started to explore what else the author had written. I noticed that she had written "a recollection" about her own life. (While in grad school I had done an independent study focusing on authors who wrote their autobiography, memoir, or recollection. It was one of my favorite classes, partly because I chose the topic, but partly because of the books that I discovered).

Sutcliff had Still's disease as a child which subjected her to many painful surgical procedures, isolation in hospitals, and general exclusion from mainstream society. Despite her extensive trials I found "Blue Remembered Hills" to contain much charm, historical information, and was a delightful pleasure to read.

I will share some of my favorite quotes with you.

"Squirrels chittered at us from behind branches, red squirrels lilting from branch to branch in the autumn sunlight like wisps of wind-torn flame."

"...and the crowing of a cock in the green first-light of my first morning, every first morning of every leave we spent there, was part of Mrs. Penhorwood to me. On later mornings it would be a nice sound, but not especially magical. But in that first dawn it would fall on my town-dulled ears, as something very magical indeed, something to shiver at with delight and something stranger than mere delight. It was the perfect sound to enter through magic casements opening wide on perilous seas and fairylands forlorn. It was a sound with a blossom on it, like dew, and shaped like a fleur-de-lys."

"We were happy, sharing a kind of peace at being together again. It seemed strange that I could be so happy. It was a broken-winged happiness that could not fly any more, but it was there, all the same,..."