Book-length criticism of Renault’s works is quite out of date, and there are few scholarly articles on her works. One difficulty, as Bernard F. Dick observes, is the fact that classical historians, who are most qualified to assess her Greek novels, are unlikely to write about historical fiction written in English. There is, however, general agreement on the high quality of her scholarship and the excellence of her style. Renault herself has said of her research, “I don’t do any; I make use of other people’s life-work,” an unduly modest statement from one who taught herself Greek in order to research her novels and has used in them a few of her own fine translations of sources. Before writing the eight novels of ancient Greece upon which her reputation rests, she wrote six novels with a modern setting. The best of these, The Charioteer (1953), brings ancient Greek imagery and sensibility to homosexual relationships in post-World War II Britain. Renault worked as a nurse before and during the war, beginning to write and taking Renault as a pseudonym for her actual surname, Challans, and in 1948 emigrated to South Africa, where she wrote The Charioteer and all the subsequent novels dealing with ancient Greece.

With The Nature of Alexander (1975), a study of his life and legend written after the first two volumes of the trilogy, Renault demonstrates her scholarship and throws into relief the stylistic and scholarly choices she made when writing the novels. She uses a straightforward but not dry or dull historical narrative style, examining carefully the evidence for various interpretations of the events of Alexander’s life and character, and often indicates why she chose one interpretation in preference to another. For example, the “miraculously” uncorrupted body of Alexander was probably the result of a lengthy coma indistinguishable from death. At her insistence, all of her Greek novels are provided with maps and a note at the end of the text explaining which persons are fictional or, if real, why she chose a certain interpretation if there are several possibilities. Bagoas was a real person, as were most of the characters in The Persian Boy. He is mentioned with varying degrees of prominence in the sources. In The Nature of Alexander, there are fewer than a dozen brief references to Bagoas, all chronicled as they appear in the sources.

Renault has said that the historical novelist is obligated to deal honestly with the facts but must also be concerned with the truth, especially the truth of human nature. “Universals of human feeling,” she observed, “thread their way among the accidents of custom and belief which, like rocks and shallows, direct their course but do not change their essence.” Judged purely on style, structure, and characterization, her soundly researched novels are an impressive body of work. Renault’s style is vivid in imagery, the dialogue has the ring of verisimilitude, and she varies her language to express the mood and tone, themes and action, and historical period of her subject.

Without resorting to cumbersome explanations, Renault evokes the atmosphere and worldview of ancient Greece from the archaic to the Hellenistic. Within the boundaries in which she has chosen to work, she is clearly a master of the novelist’s art, fusing the remote historical past with the essentials of the human condition.