SOURCE: “Falling for Desmoulins,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 16, August 20, 1992, p. 3.

In the following review, Furbank analyzes A Place of Greater Safety as a historical novel.

When Sarah Orne Jewett sent her friend Henry James a copy of her latest work, a historical novel entitled The Tory Lover, he told her it would take a very long letter to ‘disembroil the tangle’ of how much he appreciated the gift of this ‘ingenious exercise’ of hers, and how little he was in sympathy with historical novels. He begged her to come back to the modern age and ‘the dear country of The Pointed Firs’, to ‘the present-intimate’ that ‘throbbed responsive’ and was so much missing her.

The ‘historical novel’ is, for me, condemned even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job...