- Born
- 4 September 1905London, England
- Died
- 13 December 1983Cape Town, South Africa · aged 78
Mary Renault
Her novels about ancient Greece told of love between men with a dignity few dared – and she lived for fifty years with Julie Mullard.
Mary Renault, born Eileen Mary Challans in London, studied English at Oxford and then trained as a nurse. In the hospital in 1933 she met the nurse Julie Mullard. The two became partners and stayed together for half a century. Renault began writing novels while working as a nurse during the Second World War.
In 1948 the two women emigrated to South Africa, where Renault felt freer than in post-war England. There she wrote “The Charioteer” (1953), about a wounded soldier who falls in love with a young conscientious objector during the Second World War – one of the first sympathetic novels about gay men in mainstream British literature.
She then turned to ancient Greece. In novels such as “The Last of the Wine” (1956), “The King Must Die” (1958) and her trilogy about Alexander the Great, with “The Persian Boy” (1972), she depicted love between men as a natural part of the ancient world. Her books sold millions of copies and gave many gay readers a past in which they could recognise themselves.
In South Africa Renault and Mullard supported the protest movement against apartheid. Renault died in Cape Town in 1983, aged 78.