Mary Renault

Mary Renault wrote the historical novels of ancient Greece that a great many readers found their way to Athens through, and she wrote about homosexuality with a directness almost nobody else managed in the 1950s. She was born Eileen Mary Challans, read English at Oxford, and then trained as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary, where she met Julie Mullard, her partner for the next fifty years. She nursed through the Second World War, and The Charioteer, published in 1953, is set in a military hospital and treats a love affair between men as a subject rather than a tragedy; American publishers refused it for six years. She and Mullard emigrated to South Africa in 1948, and she spoke publicly against apartheid and censorship there. From The Last of the Wine in 1956 she wrote almost exclusively about Greece: that novel covers the end of the Peloponnesian War, the oligarchic coups and the rule of the Thirty Tyrants through two of Socrates' students, and it is unusually well informed about how the sources disagree. The King Must Die, The Persian Boy and Fire from Heaven followed, the last three on Alexander. Classicists have generally treated her research with respect. She said she wrote about the past because it let her write about things the present would not print. She and Mullard lived openly as a couple for fifty years without ever using the word publicly. Alexander the Great occupied her for three novels and a biography, and her treatment of his relationship with Hephaestion was unremarkable to her and startling to her reviewers. Younger writers including Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel have named her as a model.

• Lived: 1905 CE – 1983 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer