Mary Renault

Mary Renault (born Mary Challans, 1905–1983) was an English novelist whose works are still popular with devotees of the historical novel.

Life and Works

She was born in London and 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 North Face won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa. 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, published in 1953, and then in her first historical novel, 1956's The Last of the Wine, 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. ^* Renault often defends her interpretation of the available sources in author's notes attached to her books, and even her critics generally credit her with providing a vivid portrait of life in ancient Greece.

On April 18th, 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.

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)
North Face (1948)
The Charioteer (1953)

Historical novels

The Last of the Wine (1956) — set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War
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
Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae (1964) — about the Persian Wars
The Mask of Apollo (1966) — an actor at the time of Plato and Dionysius the Younger
Fire From Heaven (1969) — Alexander the Great up to his father's death
The Persian Boy (1972) — Alexander 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

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.

External links

The Greek World of Mary Renault; includes a list of historical figures featured in her novels
"The Glimpse of a Strong Greek Light," by Linda Proud, Solander, Spring 1999; a historical novelist's appreciation of Renault
Beyond Renault: Mary Renault; a historian's website looking at fictional portrayals of Alexander

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).
Catherine Zilboorg. The masks of Mary Renault: a literary biography. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

Mary Renault | מרי רנו

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