Mary Renault

Mary Renault
Born	Eileen Mary Challans (1905-09-04)4 September 1905 Forest Gate, Essex, England, UK
Died	13 December 1983(1983-12-13) (aged 78) Cape Town, South Africa
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	British
Education	St Hugh's College, Oxford
Period	1939–1981
Genre	Historical fiction
Partner	Julie Mullard

Mary Renault (/ˈrɛnoʊlt/; 4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983), born Eileen Mary Challans, was an English and South African 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

Born at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex (now in London), of physician Frank Challans and Mary Clementine Newsome Baxter Challans, Renault was educated first at Levick family school and Clifton Girls School in Bristol. She read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college, receiving an undergraduate degree in 1928. In 1933 she began training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. During her training she met Julie Mullard (1912 – 2006), a fellow nurse with whom she established a lifelong 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 has a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, and the novelist Linda Proud has described it as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance". Her novel The Friendly Young Ladies (1943), which is about a lesbian relationship between a writer and a nurse, seems to have been inspired by her own relationship with Mullard.

In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won an MGM prize worth $150,000, Renault 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." However, both Renault and Mullard were critical of the less liberal aspects of their new home, and participated in the Black Sash movement against apartheid in the 1950s.

Shortly before her death, Mary was listed as one of the famous alumnae who had brought the Radcliffe Infirmary Nurses' Home much honour. Due to the especially wet winter of 1983 in Cape Town, Mary picked up a small cough. At first, the cough was no more than a mild irritant for Mary, but it soon "become a persistent, hacking attempt to clear her lungs and catch her breath." After Julie voiced her fears to their mutual friend Dr. Sonnenberg, x-rays were performed, and Mary was diagnosed with pneumonia and was directed to a nursing home. After failing to eliminate the pneumonia with antibiotics, a visiting British surgeon performed a bronchoscopy under general anaesthetic. Shortly after, the doctor revealed to Julie that he had "found fluid on the lung and had aspirated some of it: the cause was cancer." Julie begged the doctors to say nothing to Mary unless she demanded to be told. By October, a friend of Dr. Sonnenberg, Dr. Slome, was draining off liquid twice a week and was convinced that there was a pocket he could not reach. Mary was then put on oxygen in order to ease her breathing. On 12 December 1983, as a last hope, the doctors decided to inject a new chemical into the pleura early the next morning, in the hope that it would stop further fluid from forming. Before the operation even began, Julie received a phone call, which she knew "could only mean one thing". Mary Renault died in Cape Town on 13 December 1983.

Themes

In South Africa Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time. Her sympathetic treatment of love between men won her a wide gay readership, but it also led to rumours that Renault was really a gay man writing under a female pseudonym. Renault found these rumours amusing but also sought to distance herself from being labelled a "gay writer".

Her historical novels are all set in ancient Greece. They include a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great. In a sense, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, is a warm-up for Renault's historical novels. By turning away from the twentieth century and focusing on stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social "problems". Instead she was free to focus on larger ethical and philosophical concerns while examining the nature of love and leadership. The Charioteer could not be published in the US until 1959, which made it a somewhat later addition to homosexual literature in the United States because American readers and critics had accepted serious gay love stories in such works as Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948)

Although not a classicist by training, Renault was admired in her day for her scrupulous recreations of the ancient Greek world. Some of the history presented in her fiction and in her non-fiction work, The Nature of Alexander has been called into question, however. 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 Kevin Kopelson, professor of English at the University of Iowa, Renault "mischaracterize[s] pederastic relationships as heroic." Defying centuries of admiration for Demosthenes as a great orator, Renault portrayed him as a cruel, corrupt and cowardly demagogue. Renault defended her interpretation of the available sources in author's notes attached to her books.

Though Renault appreciated her gay following, she was uncomfortable with the "gay pride" movement that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots. Like Laurie Odell, the protagonist of The Charioteer, she was suspicious of identifying oneself primarily by one's sexual orientation. Late in her life she expressed hostility to the gay rights movement, troubling some of her fans. David Sweetman remarks in his biography of Renault that her novels generally portray mothers in a poor light and that, particularly in her later novels, this is extended to women in general. Her generally negative depiction of women has also been noted by the critic Carolyn Heilbrun.

Legacy

The powerful impact Renault's work may have had on many readers, especially emerging young gay men, is suggested in a personal memoir by author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn.

Bibliography

Contemporary fiction

• Purposes of Love (1939) (US title: Promise of Love) (1939) "Vivian, a student nurse, chose her profession as a challenge, both to her spirit and to her permanently exhausted body; Mic immerses himself in his work at the hospital to ward off the emotional wounds of an unhappy childhood. Through Jan, Viv’s beloved older brother, they meet, and their friendship turns into a secret romance. Secret because, if discovered, it would cost them their jobs."
• Kind Are Her Answers (1940) "Kit Anderson is married to Janet, a beautiful but narcissistic woman who seems more shallow to him as time goes by. Their relationship has become strained and cold. Immersing himself in his work as a doctor, Anderson takes consolation in his career. Then, one night he is called out to a dying patient, and meets Christie, who is taking care of her aunt. Warm and vivacious, Christie stands in stark contrast to Janet, providing the passion and intimacy that has been missing from his life. How long can their affair be kept secret and does Kit want what is best for Christie, or only for himself?"
• The Friendly Young Ladies (1944) (US title: The Middle Mist) (1945) "Elsie, sheltered and naive, is seventeen and unhappy. Stifled by life with her bickering parents in a bleak Cornish village, she falls in love with the first presentable young man she meets – Peter, an ambitious London doctor. On his advice she runs away from home and goes to live with her sister Leonora, who escaped eight years earlier. But there are surprises in store for conventional Elsie as her sister has a rather bohemian lifestyle: not only does Leo live in a houseboat on the Thames where she writes Westerns for a living, she shares her boat – and her bed – with Helen. When Peter pays a visit, turning his attention from one ‘friendly young lady’ to the next, he disturbs the calm for each of them – with results unforeseen by all . . ."
• Return to Night (1947) "Losing out on a promotion to her ex lover, Hilary Mansell, a talented doctor, moves to a rural hospital. She is bored and unchallenged, but the routine and long hours dull her disappointment. When Julian Fleming is admitted with a serious head injury, Hilary’s skill and quick thinking save his life, and after his recovery he seeks her out. Julian is handsome, intelligent and a decade younger than Hilary, and although at first she resists his advances, she cannot help falling in love with him. Julian is a gifted actor but denies himself the career he longs for, and she senses that beneath his charm and humour something is holding him back. Before long, it becomes clear that his overbearing mother makes all the decisions in his life, and she doesn’t approve of his ambitions – or of Hilary." A French translation was published in Paris in 1948 by A. Michel, under the title "Recours à la nuit".
• The North Face (1948) (US 1949) "On holiday in the North Devon countryside, Neil Langton looks back on the wreckage of his past. He has come to believe that all happiness is behind him; the wounds from his former marriage – in which his wife cheated on him and his young daughter died – are still raw. While rock-climbing, he meets Ellen, a young woman whom he saves from a mountainside accident. Ellen, too, is looking to escape her painful past, struggling to deal with her feelings for the man she loved – a pilot who died in service. Set in postwar Britain, and filled with a memorable cast of characters."
• The Charioteer (1953) (US 1959) "Injured at Dunkirk, Laurie Odell, a young corporal, is recovering at a rural veterans’ hospital. There he meets Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly, and the men find solace in their covert friendship. Then Ralph Lanyon appears, a mentor from Laurie's schooldays. Through him, Laurie is drawn into a tight-knit circle of gay men for whom liaisons are fleeting and he is forced to choose between the ideals of a perfect friendship and the pleasures of experience."

Synopses of Renault's contemporary fiction from Virago.

Historical novels

• The Last of the Wine (1956) — set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War; the narrator is a student of Socrates
• 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 (UK 1979)
• Funeral Games (1981) — Alexander's successors

Non-fiction

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

Adaptations

The King Must Die and its sequel The Bull From the Sea were adapted by Michael Bakewell into a single 11-part BBC Radio 4 serial entitled The King Must Die. It was directed by David Spenser, broadcast between 5 June 1983 and 14 August 1983 and starred Gary Bond (Theseus), John Westbrook (Pittheus), Frances Jeater (queen of Eleusis), Carole Boyd (Aithra), Alex Jennings (Amyntor), Sarah Badel, David March and Christopher Guard. It was repeated on BBC7 17 June 2003.

The Charioteer was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Book At Bedtime across ten episodes, broadcast over two weeks from 25 November 2013.

See also

• Philippics

Sources

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

External links

• Review of The Friendly Young Ladies
• "Thursday Sep. 4, 2014", Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, birthday tribute.
• Mary Renault at Library of Congress, with 51 library catalogue records