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 her imagination was free to build as it could on a meager foundation of facts, or in the Athenian novels, which might so easily have suffered from an excess of documentation…. The world Miss Renault shows us is sufficiently in harmony with the one we have read about in history books, and yet it is a world she has created…. As we f...

[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 question about the purpose of the story. She tells it freshly, exultantly, as though it had never been told before. She has caught Herodotus's trick of making her heroes a little larger than life. She has a proper respect for Persian opulence and magnificence, and when she describes Darius or Xerxes she paints them in rainbow colors; and ...

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 colors of the glass eyes. No, she's a male impersonator…. Classical Greece, where homoerotic relations were unencumbered by moral disesteem, has set her imagination free repeatedly….

"Kind Are Her Answers" is a slighter and shallower book than "Promise of Love"; more entertaining, perhaps, but less moving. Mary Renault remains an exceedingly talented and promising novelist, but she has not, since her first book, progressed in any way…. [There] is room for shrewd comedy in "Kind Are Her Answers," plus a rueful and gentle irony. Christie, though maddening, is a completely charming character. One sees why Kit can never escape from her. Again...

"Promise of Love" [American title of "Purposes of Love"] is a first novel about first love, and possesses the rich, heady quality of the excitement of discovery of emotions and personalities…. With a fluid technique rare in a first novel, Miss Renault tells a story of emotional and psychological development which is engrossing because of, rather than in spite of, its familiarity. In a twisted and tenuous way, "Promise of Love" holds the elements of a triangle...

Renault's novels fall into two distinct periods, the first comprising several short psychological melodramas written during and after the Second World War and noteworthy for their offbeat themes, excellent structure, and sharp characterization. Her second period consists of historical novels covering various stages of ancient Greek history. Each volume in this series has resulted in an increase in Renault's reputation and popularity. Her recent novels on the life of Alexander the Great, atypic...

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 amusing, sensitive and well written; the ridiculous middle-class parents and the atmosphere of the middle-class home are perfect…. As soon as Elsie gets into the world of the friendly young ladies, Miss Renault's troubles begin. Thenceforward, whenever things are seen from Elsie's angle, the book is lively and real; her...

[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 shadowy world of the homosexual, at once familiar and strange, like a hall of mirrors in which the reflections are subtly distorted. Beyond the flashlight of Miss Renault's attention we are aware of much unseen, much unspoken. It is a world of heightened sensibility and rare delicacy, so much so that heterosexual intrusions invariably st...

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 love affair can be as relentless as if she were following the trail of a hunted fox…. ["North Face"] is as English to the core as the wooded and mountainous North Devon country in which the story is shrouded, so much so that it is difficult for an American reader to become interested at first in the inhabitants of the seaside...

[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 much younger man whose will has been destroyed and his ambition crushed by the gentle domination of his mother. The story is well, though somewhat lengthily, told, and Miss Renault succeeds in engaging one's sympathy for her characters. The novel's construction shows, however, several faults of method. First, attention is concen...

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 Charioteer," Miss Renault has examined aspects of love among men in a thoroughly contemporary setting. This book should make plain to American readers what her British audience has long known, that Miss Renault is one of the major novelists of our time. Her insights are phenomenal, her reading of the fine print of psychological history ext...

[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 tremendous feminine vitality—that sort of creative gusto which has proved first the strength and subsequently—controlled by no shaping intellectual maturity—the undoing of many a contemporary woman novelist…. This novel is about a love affair between a handsome, promising, unhappily married young doctor and an attractiv...

["North Face"] has moments when one feels that one is witnessing love in its tenderest and purest form—how old-fashioned those adjectives are!—and at the same time it is treated in a rigorously analytical manner. Never does the name do service for the thing. It is marvelous that Miss Renault's analysis does not destroy its subject, but it does not. Of course, there are other moments, when the author seems to be too much concerned with more hackneyed psychological effects. ...

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 struck by a ghastly plague. Soon Pericles died, the last great leader of the democracy. This is the time at which Mary Renault begins her remarkable novel of a dying way and the agonies of a dying city. By peopling this world for us she has made its terrible, inexorable crumbling vivid, and moving. The story is told by a young Greek, AlexiasȂ...

[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 dartings of the human mind—a fine fusion, in short, of apparent fragility with unsuspected strength…. She is sometimes too talky, too given to purely decorative effects. But ["Return to Night"] triumphs over this. And she knows how to tell a story. Unfortunately, the story she tells in the present case does not seem, ...

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…. On a double count … "Promise of Love" strikes me as an unusually excellent first novel. There is a fusion here between background and personal drama, between inner and outer reality, which enriches and dignifies both. The story of Mic and Vivian would not be nearly so arresting as it is if one were not so sharply aware of the p...

["Return to Night"] has everything Hollywood could possibly want—an English town in the Cotswold, a tense scene in the operating room, upper middle class country house interiors, Romeo and Juliet love scenes by the dozen, tea every afternoon, rain or shine, and masses of old wartime tweed. There are also a few things which Hollywood will have to rearrange. Possibly Mary Renault had something other than the M-G-M award in mind when she sat down to write "Return to Night." H...

[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. Major aspects of the wars are fascinatingly, although not always clearly, presented; a host of historical figures are briefly introduced. The author's prowess as a writer is not as evident here as in her fiction, yet style-conscious readers may go on to enjoy her as a storyteller. Priscilla L. Moulton, "Early Fall Booklist: &#x...

[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 for in Renault's historical fiction. (It is also a useful antidote to her The Persian Boy, which is far below her usual standard; admirers should stick to … her earlier books.) (pp. 271-72) W. C. McWilliams, in Commonweal (copyright © 1973 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of Commonweal Publi...