FA: MARY RENAULT: A BIOGRAPHY

MARY RENAULT: A BIOGRAPHY
Sweetman, David: MARY RENAULT: A BIOGRAPHY

New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. First US edition.



Book Description
Mary Renault wrote with such authority about Ancient Greece and of love
between men that many readers believed that the author of such well-known
works as The Charioteer, The King Must Die, The Persian Boy, and The Last of
the Wine must be male. In fact, Mary Renault was the pseudonym of an
intensely private woman - a revolutionary in sexual matters who throughout
her life preferred the company of gay men. Born Mary Challans outside
London, Renault discovered scholarship at Oxford in the early days of
admission to women. She eventually abandoned the academic world to attend
nursing school where she met her lifelong companion, Julie Mullard. Writing
became Renault's avocation, and when, in 1947, she won a large literary
award, the two women embarked for South Africa. There Renault, a passionate
believer in Greek ideals of democracy and justice, spoke out against
apartheid, but she grew disillusioned with radical politics and eventually
withdrew into her own world. Based on rare interviews with Renault and full
access to her correspondence, this is a brilliantly textured picture of
Renault that offers a revealing analysis of the author and her novels.



>From Kirkus Reviews
This first nonacademic biography of Renault was developed by Sweetman (Van
Gogh, 1990) from a rare interview granted him in 1981, two years before his
subject's death. In that interview, Renault conveyed both her discomfort
with being an ``apostle of the sexual revolution'' and her pride in the
research behind her award- winning historical novels. Daughter of a
provincial doctor, Renault attended St. Hugh's, an Oxford college for women.
To escape an idle future as a maiden daughter living in her mother's sewing
room, she trained to be a nurse. Along with the discipline and deprivation,
she discovered her sexual nature and Julie Mullard, who was to become her
life- long companion and the subject of her first novel, the subtly sexual
The Purposes of Love (1939)--the first of Renault's series of contemporary
novels that culminated in The Charioteer (1953), an open and sympathetic
depiction of homosexual love. By the time it was published, Renault--in
order to escape high taxes, the cold, and social rejection--had moved to
South Africa, where she began publishing the historical novels for which
she's best remembered. Carefully researched, richly imagined, her dignified
representations of homosexuality among the heroes and gods of ancient Greece
and Rome won her a following of gay liberationists- -whose position she
rejected as ``sexual tribalism.'' As honorary president of the Cape Town
chapter of PEN, Renault was attacked by Nadine Gordimer for not including
blacks in the chapter--which is about as controversial as Renault ever
became: When she died at age 78, many still believed that her novels had
been written by a man. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP.



Near Fine with Near Fine jacket. Very light wear.

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