“In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”
–Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo
Mary Renault (pseudonym of Eileen Mary Challans) was a British lesbian writer best known for her widely read historical-fiction novels set in ancient Greece that gained her a large following among straight and gay readers alike. When once asked who his favorite author was, President John F. Kennedy replied, “Mary Renault!” The author’s depictions of Theseus, Socrates, Plato, Alexander the Great, Alcibiades, and other classical figures add a relatable human depth to iconic characters that supplements historical or mythological knowledge.
Eileen Mary Challans was born in Essex, England in 1905 to a homemaker mother and a physician father. She had a comfortable childhood, though she was unhappy and anxious to leave, and at the age of 15, she was sent to the Clifton Girls School, a boarding school in Bristol. From 1924 to 1928, Challans attended St. Hugh’s College of Oxford, where she studied philosophy, history, mythology, and ancient literature, and was tutored by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Challans graduated with a degree in English, but her parents refused to support her chosen career as a writer. She soon moved away from home, and, in 1933, she began training to become a nurse. During her training at Radcliffe Infirmary, she met Julie Mullard who would become her life-long romantic partner.
After completing her training and while working as a nurse, Challans continued her writing. Her first novels take place in modern times and are inhabited by people in complex relationships navigating difficult situations. In 1939, Purposes of Love (in the U.S. it appeared under the title Promise of Love), was published under her pen-name Mary Renault, which she continued to use throughout her literary life. The novel is about a love triangle in a hospital setting between a man and woman, Mic and Vivian, and between Mic and Vivian’s brother Jan. Purposes of Love is also notable because it features an openly lesbian character. Edith Walton of the New York Times wrote in the March 12, 1939, issue that “even if Miss Renault’s novel were not an extraordinarily moving love story, it still would be notable as a picture of hospital life.”
Following the Purposes of Love’s financial success, the couple moved to Cornwall and were able to live on the book’s royalties in a little cottage while Challans continued writing her next novel, Kind Are Her Answers, which was published in 1940. Challans and Mullard were both drafted into service during World War II for their nursing skills and were sent to a hospital in Bristol where they cared for returning soldiers.
In 1943, The Friendly Young Ladies (in the U.S. it appeared under the title The Middle Mist) was published. This work was Challans’ only novel to deal with lesbianism and parallels her own life with the main romantic characters being a writer and a nurse. Mona McElfresh of the Cincinnati Inquirer wrote in a review in the February 24, 1945 issue proclaiming, “the characterization is excellent. Even the insignificant Elsie is shrewdly drawn. The provocative situations are handled with delicacy and subtle humor, and if the end seems a little too thinly drawn, that is a minor flaw.”
Challans’ next two books, Return to Night (1947) and The North Face (1948) were published in quick succession and were well-received by critics. Return to Night won a significant MGM Award which allowed Challans to begin making a living solely as a writer. She and Mullard emigrated to South Africa, where, except for brief trips abroad, they remained for the rest of their lives.
In 1953, The Charioteer, Challan’s first novel to feature gay men as the main characters, was published and received glowing reviews. The U.S. edition was published six years later due to fears by the publisher that the book would be labeled as pornographic simply for depicting gay people. The story follows two young men, Laurence or “Laurie” and Ralph, following the evacuation of Dunkirk in World War II England. Ralph, the older of the two protagonists and a wounded naval officer whom Laurie had idolized in school, has rescued Laurie from Dunkirk and the two have reconnected. But Laurie must choose between his two love interests: Ralph, who is more worldly and experienced, and Andrew, the conscientious objector at his hospital who hasn’t figured out his own sexuality.
Challans titled her book after the allegory of the chariot from Plato’s Phaedrus in which there is a chariot driver (the soul) and two horses representing the two sides of love: that which is noble and that which is ignoble. The soul must learn to manage the two. Since its publication, The Charioteer has been continuously in print and has become a bit of a cult classic. Kathleen Freeman, a classicist writing for the Cardiff Western Mail, stated in her 1953 review of The Charioteer, “This novel, serious, extremely well-written, assured in style and comprehensive in argument, should be read by all who wish to understand their fellow creatures … here is an author who writes with a fearless sincerity utterly remote from pruriency.”
After The Charioteer, Challans changed the subject of her writing from pure fiction to historical fiction. Challans travelled to Greece and Crete to study the layouts of Athens and Knossos, making notes on the physical geography of both places. This research proved critical in her recreation of ancient places in her novels.
In 1956, Challens published The Last of the Wine (1956), which became her greatest financial and critical success to that point in time. Set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the novel follows Alexias, a young nobleman, and Lysis, a student of Socrates. Together, Alexias and Lysis weather the war, the surrender of Athens, the Thirty Tyrants rule, and the ensuing democratic rebellion. Upon the novel’s release, the Times Literary Supplement printed a laudatory review:
The Last of the Wine is a superb historical novel. The writing is Attic in quality, unforced, clear, delicate. The characterization is uniformly successful and, most difficult of all, the atmosphere of Athens is realized in masterly fashion. Miss Renault is not only obviously familiar with the principal sources. She has disciplined her imagination so that the reader ceases to question the authenticity of her fiction.
Challans had found her calling. Her next eight novels were all historical fiction, beginning with The King Must Die (1958) and The Bull from the Sea (1962), which tell the story of Theseus and the tributes paid to King Minos. She followed her Theseus stories with The Mask of Apollo (1966) which tells the story of the thespian Nikeratos “Nikos” of Athens and Syracuse, a soothsaying theater mask, Dion, Dionysios the Elder, and Plato.
Challans followed The Mask of Apollo with the first two volumes of her Alexander the Great trilogy: Fire From Heaven (1969) and The Persian Boy (1972). Fire From Heaven begins with Alexander’s youth under his ambitious mother, Olympia, his meeting of Hephaistion, the killing of his father, King Philip II, and Alexander’s assumption of power. The Persian Boy tells the story of Alexander’s campaigns in the east from the perspective of Bagoas, a Persian eunuch captured from King Darius. In his famous Histories of Alexander the Great, the ancient Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus described Bagoas as “a eunuch exceptional in beauty and in the very flower of boyhood, with whom Darius was intimate and with whom Alexander would later be intimate.”
Challans likely knew this historical reference as well as a description from Plutarch’s Alexander of a scene at a feast in which Bagoas “won the prize for song and dance, and then, all in his festal array, passed through the theatre and took his seat by Alexander’s side; at sight of which the Macedonians clapped their hands and loudly bade the king kiss the victor, until at last he threw his arms about him and kissed him tenderly.” Challans took these ancient accounts and elevated Bagoas in her story to make him a central figure in observing Alexander, and part of a love triangle with Macedonian general, Hephaestion.
Challans took a break from Alexander to next publish The Praise Singer (1978), which tells the story of lyric-poet Simonides of Keos (ca. 556 BC-469 BCE). Simonides’ life spanned the transition from an oral to a written culture and coincided with the beginning of the Golden Age of Athens. Challans, in her book, credits Simonides with having written the tales of Homer for the first time at the direction of Hipparchus, Tyrant of Athens.
In 1981, Challans published Funeral Games, and wrapped-up her Alexander trilogy. In Funeral Games, Alexander has already died, and his successors feud among themselves to carve up his empire.
Eileen Mary Challans became ill with lung cancer and pneumonia and passed away in Cape Town, South Africa on December 13, 1983, leaving behind Julie Mullard, her partner of 50 years. At her own instruction, Challans’ papers, including correspondence and a partially finished manuscript for another book, were burned upon her death. Mullard passed away in 1996.
The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds several of Challans’ first editions in our Rare Book Collection. These materials are available for research in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. For more information, send a query to the reference staff via Ask-A-Librarian.
Sources
Curtius Rufus, Quintus. Historia Alexandri Magni. Italian. Florence, Apud Sanctum Jacobum de Ripoli, 1478.
Dick, Bernard F. The Hellenism of Mary Renault. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.
Sweetman, David. Mary Renault: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993.
Plato. Phaedrus. Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1513. Digitized through Internet Archive.
Wikipedia. “Mary Renault.”
Further Reading
Adams, Christopher. “Mary Renault in the Archives” in IES Blog. School of Advanced Study University of London.
Oxford University. St. Hugh’s College Archive.
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