On his death in 1985 The Times of London wrote of Robert Graves: "He will be remembered for his achievements as a prose stylist, historical novelist and memoirist, but above all as the great paradigm of the dedicated poet, 'the greatest love poet in English since Donne.'" This summary presents Graves's career as he would have wished; he saw himself as a poet first and a novelist second. In the latter capacity he can be fairly described as a historical novelist since only four of his seventeen novels have contemporary settings, and one is what he called "post-historical"--that is, futuristic. His historical novels range in setting from ancient Greece and Israel through imperial Rome, sixteenth-century South America and the Pacific, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century North America to Victorian England.

On the surface it appears that Graves wrote novels simply to make money. He said so himself, telling...