SOURCE: "True Merchants of the Untrue," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. CI, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 300-03.

In the following excerpt, Davenport examines how The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper fits the conventions of the historical novel and the political novel, and pronounces the book "a considerable achievement." He also comments briefly on Love's Mansion.

In 1850 Alessandro Manzoni published an essay called Del romanzo storico (it first appeared in English in 1984 as On the Historical Novel). Nineteenth-century admirers of historical fiction who read that essay must have been disheartened when the author of I promessi sposi declared the genre hopelessly unworkable, declaring that faithfulness to history and freedom of invention are inherently contradictory principles. Naive as this judgment might sound to a poststructuralist critic, Manzoni nonetheless correctly assumes that even a sophisticated reader expects a historical novel to be faithful to the past—just as he expects...