Critical Essay by W. C. Mcwilliams
[The Charioteer] is the most sensitive and accurate treatment of homosexuality I know of; modern in setting, it has all the sense for a real issue that one looks fo...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner
Despite her bibliographies and factual afterwords, Miss Renault setting out to re-create a Greek reality isn't your ordinary taxidermist, intent on matching the c...
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Critical Essay by Rose Feld
"Promise of Love" [American title of "Purposes of Love"] is a first novel about first love, and possesses the rich, heady quality of the excite...
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Critical Essay by Donald Barr
["North Face"] has moments when one feels that one is witnessing love in its tenderest and purest form—how old-fashioned those adjectives are!ȁ...
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Critical Essay by Edmund Fuller
In 430 B. C. the sweet, heady wine of Hellas was running out and little was left but the sour lees. Spartans were pillaging farms outlying Athens and the city was stru...
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Critical Essay by Hubert Saal
[The] world into which Miss Renault guides us [in "The Charioteer"] is as alien and as insular as any evocation of ancient or archaic Greece.
It is the ...
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Critical Essay by Richard Winston
In two of the finest of modern historical novels, Mary Renault has established herself as a woman writer with a unique understanding of men…. In "The C...
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Critical Essay by Edith H. Walton
As a story of high-keyed passion, "Promise of Love" is both complex and intense, yet it never loses touch with the solider kind of reality….
...
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Critical Essay by Robert Payne
[Mary Renault] has chosen to write a story for children about the Greeks defying the Persian empire ["The Lion in the Gateway"] and there is never any que...
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Critical Essay by Priscilla L. Moulton
[Mary Renault's colorful style in The Lion in the Gateway] imbues history with immediacy but also makes it difficult to determine fact and sequence. Majo...
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Critical Essay by Granville Hicks
Miss Renault is able to write about ancient Greece as if she had been there. I don't know whether I admire this gift of hers more in the Theseus novels, where...
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Critical Essay by Rosamond Lehmann
[Renault's] subject in Kind Are Her Answers is love; her treatment of it is voluptuous, with an un-English physical directness. Her manner of writing has a t...
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Critical Essay by R. Mcgeehin
Renault's novels fall into two distinct periods, the first comprising several short psychological melodramas written during and after the Second World War and not...
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Critical Essay by Edith H. Walton
"Kind Are Her Answers" is a slighter and shallower book than "Promise of Love"; more entertaining, perhaps, but less moving. Mary Renault...
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Critical Essay by Henry Reed
When the point of view [in The Friendly Young Ladies] is that of the girl, Elsie, [Miss Renault] is wholly and admirably successful. The opening chapters in Cornwall are ...
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Critical Essay by Thomas Sugrue
["Return to Night"] has everything Hollywood could possibly want—an English town in the Cotswold, a tense scene in the operating room, upper middl...
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Critical Essay by Charles Lee
[Miss Renault] is an artist to her finger tips. She writes prose that is precise and lyrical, arrestingly sensitive to the charms of nature as well as to the subtle dart...
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Critical Essay by D. S. Savage
[Miss Renault's theme in Return to Night] is love: the love between a woman doctor of thirty-four, bruised by an unhappy affair with a hospital colleague, and a ...
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Critical Essay by Harrison Smith
Mary Renault is a highly intuitive Englishwoman who writes simple, lyrical prose, and whose portrait of the mental digressions of her characters in the course of a lo...
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Critical Essay by W. C. Mcwilliams
