Wife to Mr. Milton is the only one of Graves' novels with a female protagonist; it presents itself as a journal kept by Milton's first wife, Marie Powell. It is also a more personal novel than his others, with most of the dramatic political and military events of the English civil war recounted second-hand (though we get a close-up of the execution of King Charles), but it doesn't depend on these to such an extent that this weakens it. Its strongest points are its depiction of everyday (middle-class) life during the period and its portrait of Milton, a subject whom Graves, as a poet and a student of poetry as well as a novelist, is perhaps unusually qualified to tackle. While Wife to Mr. Milton will not appeal to as wide an audience as I, Claudius, it is definitely worth a look.

June 1995

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Related reviews:

- books by Robert Graves
- books about Britain + British history
- more historical fiction