Mary Renault

Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905. She studied English at the University of Oxford and then trained as a nurse, working through the Second World War. During her nursing career she met Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong partner. Renault’s early novels dealt with contemporary relationships and included unusually direct treatments of same-sex love for their period. In 1948 she and Mullard moved to South Africa, where Renault spent the remainder of her life.

Renault became one of the twentieth century’s most influential novelists of ancient Greece. The Last of the Wine depicts Athens during the Peloponnesian War, while The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea reinterpret the Theseus myth through a historically imagined Bronze Age. Her Alexander trilogy, beginning with Fire from Heaven, follows Alexander the Great from youth to conquest and aftermath. Renault combined classical sources with psychological characterisation and treated male love as an integral part of Greek society rather than an anachronistic problem. She died in 1983. Her work remains important both for its recreation of the ancient world and for its place in the history of queer historical fiction.