Mary Renault (1905–1983) was an English novelist whose works are still popular with devotees of the historical novel.

She was born in London, real name Mary Challans, and educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college. She trained as a nurse, but by 1939 she was a published novelist, though she drew on her career experience in her early books. In 1948, after her novel North Face won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she emigrated to South Africa with her partner Julie Mullard, also a nurse. During the 1950s she was active in the Black Sash movement against apartheid.

Her early writing dealt with contemporary subjects, mostly using a wartime setting, but in 1956 she embarked on a series of books set in ancient Greece, including a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven (1970), The Persian Boy (1972) and Funeral Games (1981). Although not a classicist by training she was admired in her day for her scrupulous recreations of the Greek world; her sympathetic treatment of love between men also won her a wide gay readership.

Bibliography

• Purposes of Love (US title: Promise of Love) (1939)
• Kind Are Her Answers (1940)
• The Friendly Young Ladies (US title: The Middle Mist) (1945)
• Return to Night (1947)
• North Face (1948)
• The Charioteer (1953)
• The Last of the Wine (1956) — set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War
• The King Must Die (1958) — about the legendary/mythic Theseus (regarded by some as her best novel)
• The Bull from the Sea (1962) — sequel to The King Must Die
• Lion in the Gateway (1964)
• The Mask of Apollo (1966)
• Fire from Heaven (1969)
• The Persian Boy (1972)
• The Nature of Alexander (1975) — non-fiction
• The Praise Singer (1978)
• Funeral Games (1981)

The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea have been adapted as an 11-part BBC Radio 4 serial entitled The King Must Die.

References

• David Sweetman. (1993). Mary Renault: a biography. London: Chatto & Windus.
• Catherine Zilboorg. (2001). The masks of Mary Renault: a literary biography. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.