SOURCE: "The Housemaid's Tale," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VII, Nos. 10-11, July, 1990, pp. 34-5.

In the following mixed review, Graff discusses Mary Reilly's focus on Victorian society and feminist concerns.

Whose history counts? That's the familiar feminist question Valerie Martin explores with Mary Reilly, a novel about an earnest, solitary young woman "in service" in the household of Dr. Jekyll. The novel proposes that the Edward Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson's tale was not the infamous gentleman-scientist's most significant shadow. That honor belongs, rather, to his housemaid Mary, whose diaries record experiences with Dickensian sewers of poverty and reveal the consequences of the good Victorian gentleman's privileges and preoccupations.

The novel's grabber opening shoves us immediately into the tiny cupboard where the child Mary's drunken father brutalized her. Seeing life through Mary's eyes, we understand that, unlike Jekyll, she has no need to dabble...