Mary Renault

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Queen Victoria died four years before Mary Renault (rehn-OHLT), the pen name of Mary Challans, was born. Victoria’s death, however, did not end the spirit of Victorianism in England. Renault lived much of her first thirty years rankling under the prudish Victorian constraints that her father, Frank Challans, a physician, and others imposed on her.

Mary’s mother, Clementine Baxter Challans, daughter of a dentist, apparently never loved her husband nor their first child, Molly, as Mary Challans was nicknamed. Losing a boy in childbirth, Clementine in 1911 gave birth to Frances Joyce Challans, always called Joyce. What small affection she had to bestow was reserved for Joyce, who ultimately became Clementine’s sole heir.

Throughout the period of her life that Renault lived with her family, her mother made no pretense of being fond of her, always preferring Joyce. Clementine nagged her husband incessantly and argued with him. At his funeral, Clementine made a point of walking into the church with Joyce, leaving a solitary Molly to trail behind.

In her parents’ eyes, Renault’s future was determined at birth: She was to become an obedient wife and dutiful mother. When she showed signs of being bookish, her mother was horrified, knowing that bookish women do not find husbands. Molly began a relentless and clandestine course of reading around six, hiding in her father’s crumbling stable with favorite books. She quickly graduated from reading cowboy-and-Indian stories to immersing herself in medieval romances. At the Levicks’ School she studied French and the Bible and enjoyed singing hymns.

Joyce was the frilly, compliant little girl Clementine needed. Molly was the out-of-control tomboy but always off reading books, she at least stayed out of the way. So invisible was she that her parents apparently did not notice that her front teeth protruded, a condition that her maternal grandfather could easily have remedied had it been called to his attention.

During World War I, Frank Challans served his country in the medical corps in India. Molly and Joyce were packed off to Buckinghamshire to escape the air raids. At war’s end, Molly returned to the Levicks’ School, relearning the lessons she had been studying when she left. In 1920, she entered the Clifton Girls’ School, where she completed her secondary education.

The school’s headmistress, a graduate of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, which had only a short time before begun to accept women, encouraged Renault to apply for admission, which was eventually granted. The Challanses, however, were unenthusiastic about her going to St. Hugh’s and offered Renault only an allowance of twenty pounds a year, some sixty pounds short of what her education would cost. Borrowing money from her aunt, Renault entered St. Hugh’s and, four years later, received an Oxford degree. By that time Renault had dropped the name Molly. Everyone knew her as Mary.

Following her graduation, the Challanses did not encourage Renault to do anything except stay at home and hope for marriage, squeaking by on the twenty-pound annual allowance they still gave her. Renault, however, was sufficiently strong-willed that she left home and managed a marginal existence, making just enough money at various menial jobs to feed herself meagerly and to keep a roof over her head. Malnutrition resulted in her falling ill with rheumatic fever, which forced her to endure a protracted convalescence at home.

Until 1933, when she was twenty-eight years old, Renault lived largely in her parents’ unhappy household on the allowance they granted her, trying to write but being continually discouraged by both parents. In that year, however, she bolted, entering Radcliffe Infirmary as a nursing student. There she...

(This entire section contains 1031 words.)

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met Julie Mullard, a senior nursing student six years her junior. They soon began a relationship that lasted the rest of Renault’s life. They fell naturally into the affair that defined their sexual orientation.

Renault and Mullard, living in a Procrustean social and professional milieu, endured hardships and long separations, but they never considered abandoning each other. Despite working long and irregular hours, Renault found time for her writing and, in 1938, completed a novel set in a hospital, Purposes of Love (1939). It was published in the United States shortly thereafter and retitled Promise of Love (1940). Renault, who had been living on less than £100 a year, suddenly had the heady experience of receiving a £250 advance from Morrow. Headier still was a preponderance of positive and encouraging reviews.

Renault and Mullard worked as nurses during World War II, and Renault published two more novels, Kind Are Her Answers (1940) and The Friendly Young Ladies (1944; American edition, The Middle Mist, 1945), by the war’s end. Both novels were eclipsed by war news; the few reviews they received were lukewarm. After the war, however, Renault published two more books, Return to Night (1947) and North Face (1948), before The Charioteer (1953), which quickly became a best seller. With these books she solidified her reputation as a noteworthy novelist. Although all of her books until The Charioteer include homosexual subplots, The Charioteer was the first one to deal so unflinchingly with the issue.

This book was followed by The Last of the Wine (1956), a perennial best seller and the first of the historical novels about Greece that would occupy Renault for most of her remaining years. The King Must Die (1958), The Bull from the Sea (1962), The Mask of Apollo (1966), Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), The Praise Singer (1978), and Funeral Games (1981) all gained cultlike followings and continue to be widely read.

In 1948, two years after Renault earned the $150,000 MGM Award for Return to Night, she and Mullard, weary of Britain’s postwar austerity and eager to escape the clutches of voracious tax collectors, sailed for South Africa, settling first in Durban and later in Cape Town. They spent the remainder of their lives there, taking South African citizenship in 1950 but retaining their British citizenship.

The two mingled prominently in South Africa’s extensive homosexual communities and, in 1964, Renault became the president of the Cape Town chapter of PEN (International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists), a post she hoped would be ceremonial but one that, with the problems of apartheid, became increasingly political. Renault, diagnosed in 1970 with cancer, succumbed in 1983.

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