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Mary Renault

Mary Renault (pronounced Ren-olt) (4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983) born Mary Challans, was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander.

Biography

She was born at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex, (now Greater London). She was educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college, receiving a degree in English in 1928. In 1933, she began training as a nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. During her training, she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a life-long romantic relationship.

She worked as a nurse while beginning a writing career, treating Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol, and working in Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward until 1945. She published her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939; it had a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, which novelist Linda Proud described as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance".

In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa, where they remained for the rest of their lives. There, according to Proud, they found a community of gay expatriates who had "escaped the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain for the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Durban.... Mary and Julie found themselves able to set up home together in this new land without causing the outrage they had sometimes provoked at home." (Renault and Mullard were critical of the less liberal aspects of their new home, participating in the Black Sash movement against apartheid in the 1950s.)

It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time — in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer (1953), and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956) , the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes; her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership.

Her subsequent historical novels were all set in ancient Greece, including a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus, and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great. Although not a classicist by training, she was admired in her day for her scrupulous recreations of the Greek world. Some of the history presented in her fiction (and in her nonfiction work, The Nature of Alexander) has been called into question: her novels about Theseus rely on the controversial theories of Robert Graves, and her portrait of Alexander has been criticized as uncritical and romanticized.. According to professor Kevin Kopelson, "...Renault mischaracterize[s} pederastic relationships as heroic."

On April 18, 2006, UK, BBC 4 aired a one hour documentary, Mary Renault – Love and War in Ancient Greece, with this description:

A profile of the novelist whose books on ancient Greece convincingly brought the world of Plato and Socrates back to life. Sue MacGregor and Oliver Stone are among the contributors to this film examining how Mary Renault's popular novels set in ancient Greece inspired a new generation of readers in the 1950s.

Mary Renault died at Cape Town, South Africa, on 13 December, 1983.

Bibliography

Contemporary fiction

Purposes of Love (US title: Promise of Love) (1939)
Kind Are Her Answers (1940)
The Friendly Young Ladies (US title: The Middle Mist) (1943)
Return to Night (1947)
The North Face (1948)
The Charioteer (1953)

Historical novels

The Last of the Wine (1956) — set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War; the narrator is a student of Sokrates
The King Must Die (1958) — the mythical Theseus up to his father's death
The Bull from the Sea (1962) — the remainder of Theseus' life
The Mask of Apollo (1966) — an actor at the time of Plato and Dionysius the Younger (brief appearance by Alexander near the end of the book)
Fire from Heaven (1969) — Alexander the Great from the age of four up to his father's death
The Persian Boy (1972) — from Bagoas's perspective; Alexander the Great after the conquest of Persia
The Praise Singer (1978) — the poet Simonides of Ceos
Funeral Games (1981) — Alexander's successors

Nonfiction

The Nature of Alexander (1975) — a biography of Alexander the Great
Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae (1964) — about the Persian Wars

Radio

The King Must Die and The Bull From the Sea have been adapted as an 11-part BBC Radio 4 serial entitled The King Must Die.

References

Brian Alderson. "Challans, (Eileen) Mary" Dictionary of National Biography. Supplement, 1980-1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
David Sweetman. Mary Renault: a biography. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), ISBN 0-7011-3568-9.
Caroline Zilboorg. The masks of Mary Renault: a literary biography. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), ISBN 0-8262-1322-7.