SOURCE: “Justice and Terror,” in Times Literary Supplement, August 28, 1992, p. 17.

In the following review, Coward underlines the strengths of A Place of Greater Safety, particularly Mantel's portrayal of women and inventive narrative style.

The French Revolution produced far more history than can be conveniently digested. To help it down, it has often been served garnished with Pimpernel and smothered in ideological sauces: the Revolution as the first taste of democracy or socialism, or Terror as a political instrument. Victor Hugo and Abel Gance exploited its epic dimension. Andrzej Wajda showed a symphonic clash of Titans. Hilary Mantel prefers the intimate, non-rhetorical, chamber mode which humanizes the phenomenon of political action. She generates no new myths and grinds no ideological axe. Centre stage is not the Revolution but those who made it.

In A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel rejects the usual ploys of the historical novelist. She does...