Mary Renault, a white woman with short dark hair. She wears a button up blouse and looks to the left.
"I was much struck by the frequency with which works of literature, and facts of history, which sinful and suffering human beings had created with blood and tears, were expounded by scholars who, with the most meticulously detailed knowledge of the externals, had not the remotest clue as to what any of it was all about."
History has the power to inform and present broader perspectives on the human experience. For many queer people in the mid 20th century, the history of Classical Greece provided a space where their existence was not just precedented but celebrated. Mary Eileen Challans, known by the pseudonym Mary Renault, was profoundly impacted by ancient Greek literature, which explored same-sex relationships in a way that was unthinkable in contemporary Britain. At times torn between her calling as a writer and her duty as a nurse, Mary authored contemporary and historical novels for over 40 years. They were unusual at the time for their open and empathetic portrayal of queer lives. Her books explored contemporary issues, including both World Wars, the escalating persecution of homosexuals, and apartheid. Throughout all this she was anchored by her partner of 48 years, Julie Mullard.
Born in England in 1905, Mary Renault (born Eileen Mary Challans) was described as awkward and tomboyish, with a love of literature. She became obsessed with the mythologized Wild West and would hide Western novels in the attic to read without her mother noticing. Mary's mother lost interest in her once it became apparent that she would not conform to her expectations of a daughter.
"I was born there and spent most of my childhood in it, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want out—as soon, whenever it was, as I discovered that out existed." - Mary Renault, letter to Jay Williams, February 21, 1975.
At the outset of World War I, Frank Challans was sent to the front, and by 1915, the Great War had spilled over into the skies of Britain. During air raids, Mary and her younger sister sheltered in the basement of a local bakery as German zeppelins and bombers sailed overhead. Mary quickly learned all that the local primary school had to offer, but was not enrolled in secondary school by her mother. Her father's return from the war brought little comfort to her, as he was a shell of his former self. Left out of school, Mary turned to her father's library. By age 12, she had memorized the poetry of Roman authors like Horatius and Regillus.
Mary found a kindred spirit in her university-educated aunt Bertha, who had no children. At the age of 15, her aunt arranged for her to attend a boarding school. Mary was behind many of her peers and had difficulty catching up in math and Classical languages. Later in life, she relied on translations in the Loeb Library. She recalled discovering an English translation of Plato's Phaedrus in the boarding school library. The philosophy on love it contained had a lasting impact on her life and work. This began a lifelong affair with the Classics, where she unearthed lives that were as varied, flawed, and hard to define as her own.
Mary borrowed money from her aunt to attend St. Hugh's College at Oxford, as her father did not believe women needed a university education. Studying history under the tutelage of J.R.R Tolkien, she became interested in the Medieval period. Tolkien encouraged her writing, and during his tutelage, she penned the manuscript of a Medieval fantasy novel. Living on her own for the first time, she could freely express her interests. She decorated her room with Medieval tapestries and took up knife-throwing as a hobby. Mary's mother was dismayed at her decision to pursue an education rather than marry young, and she frequently berated her for being unfeminine and unattractive.
After receiving her degree, she began writing her first manuscripts, which were stifled by a lack of life experience. After graduation, Mary sought opportunities to study people, and became an actor in a local drama group. The theatre became a familiar setting in her novels, where she examined the masks that people wore, both on and off-stage. Many of her characters were actors, using the mask and costume as metaphors for crossing boundaries and reinventing oneself, including subverting or dissolving gender boundaries. Many of her friends and acquaintances during this time were queer men, with whom she felt a certain affinity.
In 1933, Mary became a nurse so that she could support herself without her parents. A year into her training at Radcliffe Infirmary, she met fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Seven years her junior, Julie had by that point lived a relatively sheltered life, but they found much in common. Julie came from a lower-class background, the illegitimate daughter of a strict and unloving mother. Both women had come to Radcliffe Infirmary to escape their lives. Despite mutual attraction, both were reluctant to make their feelings known. Neither had been in a relationship with a woman before, nor did they know any openly queer women. Julie later remarked that, in the absence of a framework to describe their sexuality, "we thought we had invented it."
They entered into an open relationship, with each of them also dating men before eventually committing to a more monogamous relationship with each other. It was during their early relationship that Mary began working on a manuscript titled "First Love", which developed into her debut novel, Purposes of Love. To prevent her parents and colleagues at Radcliffe Infirmary from discovering her work, she adopted the pen name Mary Renault, which she used for the rest of her career. The novel's success made her consider the prospect of becoming a full-time writer.
Over the next decade, Mary churned out contemporary romances, many of which featured gay and bisexual characters. In writing homosexuality and bisexuality as normal facets of human life, her work was different from authors like Radclyffe Hall who portrayed lesbianism as a tragedy or illness. She explored love between women most prominently in The Friendly Young Ladies (1944). The novel focused on Leo, an uninspired novelist struggling to choose between her relationship with a nurse and a heterosexual marriage. This bisexual love triangle is complicated by Leo’s fluid gender identity as a masculine-presenting person who views herself in both male and female terms. Taking inspiration from Mary’s own life experiences, it was the last of her novels to center love between women in its narrative.
Mary's writing career was interrupted when she and Julie were called up for obligatory service at Radcliffe Infirmary. As the war raged on, they moved to the hospital's neurosurgical department, under the famous surgeon Hugh Cairns. While she and Julie were busy treating incoming patients from the Battle of Dunkirk, her second book was published. After the Nazis were defeated in Europe, Mary was free to resume writing. While most of London took to the streets to celebrate the war's end, Mary was at her typewriter. Her experiences during the war forced her to think about the consequences of warfare, violent masculinity, and social irresponsibility, themes that pervade her historical novels.
In the summer of 1947, Mary won a $150,000 MGM prize. Eager to escape the dreariness of post-war Britain, they boarded the S.S. Cairo bound for South Africa, encouraged by low taxes and the prospect of living together more openly. The journey took them through the Mediterranean and down the coast of Africa. Arriving in Durban, South Africa, they burned through their money after being defrauded by two other gay English expatriates, and getting into a highway collision that left Mary with injuries requiring weeks of surgery. After this accident, Mary was left with facial scars that she bore for the rest of her life. Now in debt, Mary and Julie moved into a beachfront cottage near Cape Town that they christened Delos. In the sexually tolerant milieu of urban South Africa, their social circle was primarily made up of gay men, many of whom Mary met through the theatre community. However, they had very few lesbian acquaintances and felt largely unconnected to the lesbian community. By 1950, a worsening economy and escalating racial tensions had signaled that their new home was not the postwar paradise they imagined, but they were determined not to return to England.
Even in South Africa, Mary was haunted by her experiences in the war. Her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer, centers on the romance between a conscientious objector and an injured veteran, combining her experience as a wartime nurse with her childhood fascination with Greek philosophy. The novel marked the transition between her contemporary romances and her historical novels. Like her earlier novels, it took place in a contemporary English hospital setting, but it recalled the Classical Greek setting and male/male romances which would dominate her later books.
The protagonist of The Charioteer comes out as a gay man, while struggling with the fact that he does not feel at home on the gay community. The conflict between his idealism and his desire to work on an imperfect relationship with his partner is symbolized by Plato's metaphor of the human soul as a chariot pulled by two horses, one pulling towards destruction and the other towards spiritual harmony. Through the viewpoints of the novel’s protagonists, the book explores the philosophical dimensions of love and unrequited passion. It resonated with audiences, many of whom had never been confronted with sympathetic or multi-dimensional gay characters in literature. When The Charioteer hit UK bookshelves in 1953, it became an immediate bestseller. Few English novels had dealt with love between gay men, none of them in terms as frank and positive as The Charioteer.
A darker backdrop influenced the book, as Mary heard about the escalating persecution of homosexuals in the United States and her home country of England. The homophobic paranoia stoked by politicians like David Maxwell Fyfe and Joseph McCarthy made the novel extremely controversial, but Mary was determined to publish it. Just a few weeks after its publication, the newspapers were captivated by the trial of John Gielgud, a well-known actor put on trial for breaking England's anti-sodomy laws. British audiences immediately associated The Charioteer with the renewed debate about reforming the repressive sodomy laws. Despite the novel’s commercial success, American publishers refused to publish it until 1959.
Mary is today most well known for her novels set in Classical Greece, beginning with The Last of the Wine (1956). The novels brought the past to life in vividly sensual prose, and received scholarly praise for their faithful recreation of ancient Greek society. If the homosexual love in The Charioteer had found its footing in the ancient past, her later novels made antiquity synonymous with same-sex love. Relationships between men, which were so interwoven with the social fabric of ancient Greece, were largely glossed over by historians and novelists of the day. With her historical novels, Mary removed the fig leaf which had covered these relationships and featured almost exclusively queer protagonists. The critical and commercial success of her Greek novels brought positive queer representation to the mainstream. For the first time, contemporary audiences were exposed to settings where gay and bisexual relationships were considered normal.
Mary found herself swamped with fan mail and letters from other authors, but she attempted to keep up with these correspondences until old age prevented her. Much of her fan mail came from young people eager for gay representation or who were inspired to pursue careers in Classics or archaeology. Some of the men who wrote to her during their childhood became authors themselves, such as Daniel Mendelsohn and her future biographer David Sweetman. As her popularity grew, she curated her public image. Carefully selected photos of her adorned the dust jackets of her novels, presenting the outward appearance of a respectable middle-aged English woman and letting none of her eccentricities shine through. Her public image was so incongruous with the themes and content of her work, that it was widely rumored that Mary Renault was the pseudonym of a gay man who almost certainly lived in Greece.
Centering her novels on queer men allowed her to elucidate the intimacy and anxieties that she as a woman in a queer relationship, but that choice was more than a simple mask for autobiographical confessions. Mary had always identified strongly with male subjects, from Alexander to the cowboys of her youth. In her male protagonists, she found a mirror for her complex relationship with gender and bisexuality. By and large, women play minimal roles in her historical novels, only assuming power in the narrative after taking on a male role and presenting an outwardly masculine appearance. Axiothea, a lesbian who appears in The Mask of Apollo, is one of the most notable examples of this. Like Leo, her masculinized gender allowed her to "be true to the mind before the body." Gender fluidity is portrayed, through the actor Nikeratos and the eunuch Bagoas, who identifies as a third-sex, neither male nor female. In that way, the fluid identities of characters like Bagoas or Nikeratos mirrored some aspects of her own life. The fluidity of sex and gender in her novels had little precedent in mid-century literature and was not appreciated until decades later.
Turning to the life of Alexander, she found her ideal subject, the perfect muse. She chronicled the life and death of Alexander the Great with Fire From Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and The Funeral Games (1981). The trilogy covers Alexander's conquests and philosophical development, as well as his polyamorous relationships. Although married to Roxana, Alexander's primary relationships are with his childhood friend Hephaestion and the Persian Bagoas. This trilogy received critical praise for its accurate representation of the Hellenistic period, but it also found a wide gay readership.
Mary Renault's Alexander is a romantic dreamer who resorts to the brutal necessities of ruling. The accuracy of her Alexander is debatable, but it was firmly rooted in an idealized perception of him that has existed since his own lifetime. Her fascination with him was intensified by her experiences living through WWII and during apartheid. While the tyrants of the 20th Century relied on racism and bigotry to justify atrocities, Mary saw Alexander's appreciation of other cultures as part of his magnetic appeal. The racial tensions and inequalities which underpin her historical novels are almost rectified by Alexander, who promotes unity in his short-lived empire.
"Often I think far less enduring evil was done in the world by the great conquerors of earlier ages, who felt no need of any moral justification to go forth and take for themselves the lands of other rulers. ... Feeling their right to be conquerors self-evident, they had no need to work up hatred against the enemy or to make out the population was sub-human. Of course they caused immeasurable agony and bloodshed, as all wars do, but provided they were not oppressive to the conquered lands they did not leave behind this terrible legacy of Us and Them."
Mary was honorary president of Cape Town's chapter of P.E.N. International and a prominent figure in the local literary community. Her concerns over the political climate inspired The Last of the Wine, which drew parallels between the democratic crisis in Athens in the 5th Century BC and the issues facing contemporary South Africa. Mary staunchly opposed censorship and the rapidly escalating racism in her new home. She joined the anti-apartheid Black Sash movement with Julie, and visited the imprisoned writer Alex La Guma, leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation (SACPO).
Mary made numerous appeals to the government to prevent the passing of anti-homosexuality laws. At the same time, she had personal reservations about the gay rights and women’s liberation movements which were gaining momentum internationally during the '70s and '80s. She viewed social issues as being primarily moral, and refused to accept politics as a meaningful cause of its own. Her belief that art was the most effective catalyst for social change made her impatient with political organizations. Preferring to stay out of the political limelight, her primary form of protest was through fiction which dealt with social and political issues.
When the South African government segregated theaters in 1965, she refused to boycott local theaters, believing that silencing artistic expression would have the opposite effect. Her limp support of black writers who struggled to receive recognition in a fundamentally racist society drew criticism, most notably from writer and activist Nadine Gordimer. Gordimer, who had lived in South Africa for her entire life, felt that it was necessary to compensate for the countless disadvantages facing black authors. When Gordimer suggested that the requirements for entry into P.E.N. be lowered for black writers, Mary argued that it was condescending and that women writers had refused similar accommodations made for them in the past. These disagreements developed into a years-long feud between the two women. Her apparent political indifference interested journalists as it became more well known, the transgressive themes of her work seeming at odds with the relative conservatism of the author.
Her private reservations about politics were not widely known, and did not prevent her from becoming an icon of the gay rights movement. By the mid '70s, Mary Renault's work was widely available in gay bookstores, some of which even had a "Renault Section". Many of her novels became staples in curriculums for the newly emerging fields of Gay Studies and Gay Literature. Her portrayals of gay men and gender performance were analyzed through the framework of queer theory and gender studies. All at once, she was a figurehead and an object of study in a sexual revolution she was only peripherally involved in.
In 1970, Mary began having uterine issues requiring a hysterectomy, and was diagnosed with cancer. Unwilling to burden Mary with the news and possibly worsen her health prospects, Julie chose not to inform her of the illness. She removed the labels from the pills and injections prescribed to Mary and told her they were hormone replacements. Mary slowly recovered and resumed her work. Julie's mental health steadily worsened as she took responsibility for Mary's healthcare on top of her list of domestic duties. After Mary broke her leg while walking their dogs, Julie had a mental breakdown and was briefly committed to a mental health clinic. After receiving electroshock therapy and a prescription for tranquilizers, Julie was released from care.
With her health uncertain, Mary rushed to complete as many of her projects as possible while her health permitted. She published The Nature of Alexander (1975), a non-fiction biography of the man who had captivated her for years. She also completed several other historical fiction novels, including The Praise Singer, her only Greek novel to feature a heterosexual protagonist. By 1983, Mary was battling severe pneumonia. Further exams revealed that the underlying cause was cancer, and Julie once again withheld the diagnosis. Mary had nearly completed a final novel, set during the Crusades, which was to remain unfinished.
Within a few months, her condition rendered her unable to write or take calls. She became increasingly isolated before being transferred to a nursing home. Five days later, on December 13, 1983, she died at age 78. Her ashes were scattered in Ceres, where she had often spent holidays with Julie. In accordance with her final wishes, thousands of her letters, which contained private information from closeted fans, were burned.
In the decades after her death, she has been newly recognized for her contributions to queer literature. She carved out a place for non-heteronormative or heterosexual expression, using history as a lens through which different experiences could be understood and examined. Her novels have continued to influence film and literature into the 21st Century. Through prolific letter writing, she also used her platform to support many gay youths on a personal level.
Less well known are the way she used her platform as a writer to protest censorship and apartheid in her expatriate home of South Africa. Within the South African literary community, her unwillingness to make concessions in the interest of diversity drew criticism. Her idiosyncratic personal views resulted in a political legacy that is less celebrated than her literary creations, but every bit as complex.
About the Author
This piece was written by A.E. Kerry. A.E. Kerry is a history and fiction writer with a background in Classical Antiquity. They have a particular interest in gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and modern reactions to historical queerness.