Heretics: Mary Renault
Mary Renault (1905–1983):
Mary Renault was a British novelist best known for her historical fiction set in ancient Greece. Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, she studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, before training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There she met fellow nurse Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong partner. Renault worked as a nurse through much of the 1930s and during the Second World War, publishing her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939. Her 1947 novel Return to Night won a $150,000 prize from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, giving Renault and Mullard the financial means to move to South Africa in 1948, where they remained for the rest of their lives.
Renault published The Charioteer in 1953, a novel centered on relationships between gay men in wartime Britain. She then turned to the ancient world, including the Theseus trilogy. Her books brought together extensive historical research with fictional accounts. Renault was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1959 and continued writing until near the end of her life. She died in Cape Town in 1983 at the age of seventy-eight.
For More:
The Last of the Wine: Mary Renault
Mary Renault: A Biography: David Sweetman
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