I like Sutcliff a lot too, though I've only written for one of her books (Sword at Sunset). There's a lot of similarites there--she also has lovely nature description and intense male friendships. : )
I really wonder about D K Broster and how much she intended the homoeroticism in this book. It's so hard to imagine that it wasn't intended, especially given that this kind of thing seems to have been a theme of hers--then again, it doesn't seem to have been interpreted that way at the time. I feel kind of sorry for her that she didn't live in a time when she could have been happily publishing explicit m/m romance! (Also, it seems like she never married and lived her whole life happily cohabiting with her female best friend...)
I find I can ignore the often-present issues with settings like that as long as they're not directly relevant to these characters and their stories—I mean, Flight of the Heron is pretty much, we're all gentlemen here, honour and the decent thing and all that, and I don't have to think about what was happening to the peasants as long as they're not actually there in the story. But YMMV, of course.
Oh, I didn't feel conflicted about it while reading the book. It was more when I started to do research and came across things like this on Wikipedia: "Those [Cameron tenants who did not wish to join the uprising] were whipped or threatened with eviction, a process supervised by Archibald Cameron..."
no subject
I really wonder about D K Broster and how much she intended the homoeroticism in this book. It's so hard to imagine that it wasn't intended, especially given that this kind of thing seems to have been a theme of hers--then again, it doesn't seem to have been interpreted that way at the time. I feel kind of sorry for her that she didn't live in a time when she could have been happily publishing explicit m/m romance! (Also, it seems like she never married and lived her whole life happily cohabiting with her female best friend...)
I find I can ignore the often-present issues with settings like that as long as they're not directly relevant to these characters and their stories—I mean, Flight of the Heron is pretty much, we're all gentlemen here, honour and the decent thing and all that, and I don't have to think about what was happening to the peasants as long as they're not actually there in the story. But YMMV, of course.
Oh, I didn't feel conflicted about it while reading the book. It was more when I started to do research and came across things like this on Wikipedia: "Those [Cameron tenants who did not wish to join the uprising] were whipped or threatened with eviction, a process supervised by Archibald Cameron..."
But yeah, I will go with book canon...