Mary Renault: The Nurse Who Rebuilt Ancient Greece
She was fifty-one and had already published five contemporary novels when she abandoned the present tense entirely. *The Last of the Wine* (1956) put a student of Socrates at the centre of the Peloponnesian War and became her greatest critical and financial success. For the remaining twenty-five years of her life Mary Renault wrote about almost nothing else, and John F. Kennedy named her his favourite author.
Eileen Challans of Forest Gate
Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans on 4 September 1905 at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex, the daughter of the physician Frank Challans and Mary Clementine Newsome. It was not a happy house. Her parents quarrelled, her father was neglectful, and she believed her younger sister Frances Joyce was the favourite. She was educated at the Levick family school and Clifton Girls School in Bristol before going up to St Hugh's College, Oxford, in 1924 — an all-women's college, in the years when that mattered. She read English and came away in 1928 with third-class honours, which is not the record of a great scholar. It is, however, only half the story: alongside the formal syllabus she absorbed history, mythology, philosophy and ancient literature, studied Latin properly, and taught herself Ancient Greek. Her tutor J. R. R. Tolkien urged her towards medieval fiction. She wrote some, decided it lacked authenticity, and burned it.
The Radcliffe Infirmary
Her father would not support a writing career, so in 1933 she began training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. The decision shaped everything after it. In the nurses' home she met Julie Mullard, and the two began a relationship that lasted the rest of Renault's life, conducted at first with the necessary discretion of women slipping into each other's rooms at night. Mullard received a proposal of marriage from a male lover; the partnership survived it. During the war both worked at Winford Emergency Hospital treating men evacuated from Dunkirk, and Renault served in the Radcliffe's brain surgery ward until 1945. Nobody who has read her battlefield wounds doubts where they came from.
Novels of the Present Tense
She took the name Mary Renault from Froissart's *Chronicles*, partly to keep the writing secret from people likely to disapprove. *Purposes of Love* (1939), her first novel, featured an openly lesbian character; the advance from her American publisher bought her an MG sports car, which she and Mullard promptly crashed, neither holding a valid licence. *Kind Are Her Answers* followed in 1940. *The Friendly Young Ladies* (1943), drawn from her life with Mullard, is the one book of hers usually called a lesbian novel outright. Then in 1947 *Return to Night* won an MGM prize worth £37,000 — a transforming sum — and she could write full time.
The last and best of the contemporary books was *The Charioteer* (1953), about two young gay servicemen who model their relationship on Plato's *Phaedrus* and *Symposium*. American publication waited until 1959. *The Telegraph* was still calling it a classic in 2014; Noël Coward called it "turgid, unreal and so ghastly earnest," and wished she would stick to recreating the glory that was Greece.
Durban
In 1948, flush with the MGM money, Renault and Mullard emigrated to Durban, which had an established community of gay and lesbian expatriates, and where the two women could live openly as a couple without provoking comment. They later moved to Cape Town, where Renault spent the rest of her life. She served as president of the South African chapter of International PEN from 1964 to 1981 and joined the Black Sash movement against apartheid in the 1950s, becoming disillusioned in 1968 when the organisation declined to protest anti-homosexuality laws. Her own account, given in 1979, was characteristically unflattering to herself: she had signed petitions and written protests, she said, but would not pass herself off as a heroine, though she had never profited from apartheid.
Greece
The historical novels came in two great sequences. *The Last of the Wine* was followed by the Theseus books — *The King Must Die* (1958) and *The Bull from the Sea* (1962), the second of which makes the Amazon queen Hippolyta Theseus's co-equal, a portrait critics single out for its courage and honesty. *The Mask of Apollo* (1966) follows an actor through the era of Plato and Dionysius the Younger. *The Praise Singer* (1978) takes the poet Simonides of Ceos.
Then Alexander. *Fire from Heaven* (1969) covers the boy from the age of four to his father's death and was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. *The Persian Boy* (1972) is narrated by the enslaved eunuch Bagoas after the Persian conquest — a technical gamble that came off. *Funeral Games* (1981) is about what his successors did to the empire. Between them she wrote *The Nature of Alexander* (1975), a straight biographical study, and *The Lion in the Gateway* (1964) on the Persian Wars.
Running through all of it is a theory of love drawn from the *Phaedrus*: eros as a struggle between the pursuer and the pursued, structured by differences of age and status. In same-sex relationships, those hierarchies gave her alternatives to conventional gender roles — which is, in part, why she wrote them.
Why Mary Is Called a Genius
The quality at issue is imaginative reconstruction: the ability to inhabit a vanished mental world so completely that its assumptions feel like common sense rather than exotica. Britannica credits her scholarship and her skill at re-creating classical history and legend; the historian Tom Holland has said no other novelist has so successfully evoked ancient Greece's beauty, charisma and terror. Daniel Mendelsohn has written about her formative effect on him as a young reader. Suzanne Collins credits *The King Must Die* with the arena at the heart of *The Hunger Games*. That is a real intellectual achievement, and it rested on self-taught Greek and decades of reading, not on a university's imprimatur — she left Oxford with a third.
The counter-case is substantial and she would not have dodged it. Her Theseus books absorbed Robert Graves's contested theories; Mary Beard and John Henderson found her Crete a weird other world conveniently freed of modern sexual inhibition; her Alexander has been called uncritical and romanticised, her Demosthenes a caricature that defies the historical record. Kevin Kopelson argued she mischaracterised pederastic relationships as heroic. Her women, Hippolyta excepted, are largely confined to wives and mothers and frequently drawn with active dislike. This is not a scholar's precision dressed as fiction; it is a novelist's conviction, powerful enough to have persuaded several generations that it was the same thing.
Legacy
Renault fell ill in August 1983 with lung cancer and pneumonia, tried to finish a last novel, and died in Cape Town on 13 December. She ordered her papers, correspondence and the unfinished manuscript burned. Mullard survived her until 1996. Virago republished the novels; the BBC serialised the Theseus books on radio in 1983 and *The Charioteer* in 2013; a 2006 BBC Four documentary drew on Bettany Hughes, Oliver Stone and Sue MacGregor. Her royalties now fund the Mary Renault Prize at St Hugh's, for essays on classical reception — the third-class graduate endowing the study of her own subject.
