When Mary Renault died in 1983, she was one of the most popular historical novelists in the English language; her books have been translated into every major tongue. While her novels helped many people come to terms with their sexuality and gave homosexuals a place in history, she also offered straight readers a sympathetic world “where heterosexuality was neither the only nor the dominant sexual type.”
The very first thing one sees at the very top of the Forward of this very interesting and revealing biography is a one-liner in Italics. It’s taken from a 1974 comic melodrama designed to amuse a gay audience. In the scene in question, a gay bank clerk makes a comment to an attendant of a local California steam bath: Nobody reads Mary Renault in public. It’s a dead giveaway. Mary Renault wouldn’t have been amused even though she was an out lesbian. She didn’t especially want her books to belong to any sexual grouping. The author tells us that a look at her sales figures confirms that she succeeded beyond her expectations in this area.
In Mary Renault: A Biography, David Sweetman quotes from a letter Renault received from England after the publication of her novel The Last of The Wine. The writer, a vicar in Bath, England, was confused about her gender—as were many of her readers. He wrote, “Both my friend and I think it would be a mistake to buy your other books for we do not think they would be half as good. We speculate about you and I have hazarded a guess that you are a man writing under a nom de plume.” And, a nom de plume she used, but she was a woman and she valued her privacy.
The author, David Sweetman, explains the word usage as he found it to deal with homosexuality and racial strife in South Africa from the turn of the century to 1993. Renault never used the word “gay, ” but did use the Old French word gai in its original sense; festive; gay in spirits or manner. If you called a homosexual gay before the first half of the last century, you would have provoked incomprehension; no one would have known what you were talking about.
It seems that when Renault was living in South Africa after 1947, if you called an African a “black” you would have risked being seriously hurt. Today, South Africans are proud of being called black, while the word coloured is found to be offensive and the usage is much diminished. In America, many blacks ask to be called African-Americans and using the word coloured is as bad as using the “N” word.
While Mary Renault became known as a standard bearer of the sexual revolution, she was best known in South Africa as the president of the Cape Town Center of PEN International, a world association of writers. P.E.N. acts as a powerful voice in opposing political censorship and speaking for writers harassed, imprisoned, sometimes murdered for the expression of their views.
Born in a fashionable London suburb on September 4, 1905 to Frank Challans, MD and his wife Mary Clementine, her real name was Eileen Mary Challans. Her stuffy mother who was also named Mary, called her Molly because of her Irish looks. This tomboyish child was constantly taunted by a mother who liked the word nice. Mama wanted everything to be nice and was a constant nag. Nothing her child ever did was nice enough or feminine enough.
Mary Clementine didn’t spare the doctor her tongue either. A venomous tension quickly developed between them and little Molly was shielded from the arguing by closed doors, behind which, she spent her time reading and beginning to write. When the War of 1914 came along, it freed her father from his marriage; he was enrolled into the Royal Army Medical Corps and sent to India where he remained for the duration. Molly was sent to several girls’ schools and eventually found a scholarship to Oxford during the time when women were first admitted.
Her father was unimpressed and would only give £20 a year towards her education. Mary got the other £60 from an aunt and repaid her when she began working. Mrs. Challans was likewise unimpressed and declared women students to be “unfeminine and lacking in sex appeal.” Mary’s sister, Joyce, was petite and feminine and her adoring mother coddled her. When Mrs. Challans died in 1960, not even one of those nice little objects from the side table in the living room was willed to Mary. Joyce got it all; and, it wasn’t until much later that Mary was able to admit to the extent to which she longed for her mother’s approval.
She went to Oxford with the idea of teaching, but decided that she wanted to be a writer. After taking her degree she then trained for three years as a nurse, and wrote her first published novel. Oddly enough, her earliest books were a series of contemporary novels, published before WW II. She chose the nom de plume Mary Renault for her first novel Promise of Love, a hospital story, that hinted at the forbidden subject of lesbian love.
It was during her nursing career that she met Julie Mullard. Both nurses, they were to be friends and lovers for the next 48 years. They shared their lives (mostly) at the Cape in South Africa until Mary’s death in 1983. They seemed to have known this would be so from their very first night together. Julie watched over and took care of Mary. Mary wrote some of the most wonderful historical novels ever published.
In 1947, she won the MGM award of $150, 000 (over £37, 000 at the time) for her novel Return to Night. The MGM award was given to successful novels in hopes that they would make successful movies. The only drawback was that none of the winning books was ever filmed and the awards were abandoned shortly after Mary won her prize. No matter, Mary and her companion, Julie, had been transported from genteel poverty to wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Eventually Mary and Julie moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where she wrote all of her Greek novels and her novels about Alexander the Great.
She traveled considerably in Africa and went up the East Coast to Zanzibar and Mombasa. Oddly enough, she never made more than a few trips to Greece, but she saw the world through a Greek sensibility and even in her early novels it shows how she felt about it. Her travels in Greece resulted in her brilliant historical reconstructions of ancient life where male to male love was common rather than uncommon.(Harcourt Brace & Co., ISBN: 0-15-193110-0).
Since we seem to be limited to a certain word length on this site, I have created a second document and given a brief synopsis of each book on my review of a very interesting web site called The World of Mary Renault at https://ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Renault/renault.html.
The Greek books include The Bull From the Sea, The King Must Die, The Praise Singer, The Last of the Wine, and The Mask of Apollo. The trilogy based on the life of Alexander the Great includes Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games. The review of the web site will follow shortly.