Reviewed in Brief

The Last of the Wine, by Mary Renault. 389 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $4.50

Apart from those by Robert Graves, the only good historical novels of recent years were by women: Bryher, Zoe Oldenbourg, Marguerite Yourcenar. Now Mary Renault quietly joins their ranks with a cool, graphic frieze of life in ancient Greece. Ethics and athletics, Socrates and Plato, Peloponnesian War and Athenian peace are all here, subtly rendered, and with none of the flagrance or anachronism that seems inevitable when a man tries the same thing. Is it, perhaps, because a woman has less egocentricity, more yielding disinterest than a man when it comes to recreating nuances of feeling and behavior other than her own?

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Roger Becket

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The Last of the Wine, by Mary Renault. 389 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $4.50

Apart from those by Robert Graves, the only good historical novels of recent years were by women: Bryher, Zoe Oldenbourg, Marguerite Yourcenar. Now Mary Renault quietly joins their ranks with a cool, graphic frieze of life in ancient Greece. Ethics and athletics, Socrates and Plato, Peloponnesian War and Athenian peace are all here, subtly rendered, and with none of the flagrance or anachronism that seems inevitable when a man tries the same thing. Is it, perhaps, because a woman has less egocentricity, more yielding disinterest than a man when it comes to recreating nuances of feeling and behavior other than her own?