From Publishers Weekly
This outstanding biography of the celebrated historical novelist was a Lambda Literary Award nominee. Photos. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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 heros 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. Somewhere between this wary approach to an exceptional mind and the academic jargon that Renault seems to attract, there's still much to be explained. Renault continues to wear her own Mask of Apollo. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
The author of The Charioteer and The King Must Die, Renault studied at Oxford but eventually abandoned the academic world and England for South Africa, where she and her companion, Julie Mullard, remained. "A superb biography of an exceptional novelist" (New Yorker). Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Index; photographs.
Mary Renault: A Biography ANNOTATION
One of the most popular novelists of the 20th century, and the first to present homosexual love in popular novels, Renault shunned publicity. In a candid biography, Sweetman, one of few ever granted an interview with the reclusive Renault, tells her intriguing and fascinating story. Photos.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Mary Renault wrote so sympathetically and with such candor about the male world of Ancient Greece and about love between men that many readers believed the best-selling author of The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, and The Persian Boy must be a man. In reality, Mary Renault was the pseudonym for a surprising and intensely private woman, born Mary Challans in a genteel London suburb. In this first biography, David Sweetman, who met and filmed Mary Renault for the BBC in 1981 and corresponded with her until her death in 1983, unravels the mystery of this unseen woman. She began as a bookish, withdrawn child of disappointed parents and became a standard-bearer of the sexual revolution. She discovered scholarship at Oxford, in the days when women had only just been admitted, but abandoned the academic world for a nursing career. When, in 1947, she won an MGM award for $150,000, she embarked for South Africa with her lifelong companion, Julie Mullard, never to return to England. A revolutionary in sexual matters, she was accused of being politically reactionary; a passionate believer in Greek ideals of democracy and justice, she was among the first to join Black Sash, the women's movement that was in the forefront of the fight against apartheid, but over the years her disillusionment with radical politics led her to withdraw into a fictional world of her own creation. With full access to Mary Renault's letters and papers and to the story of her long romance with Julie, David Sweetman reveals how, in its concerns, her life cannot be divorced from her fiction, combining a brilliantly textured picture of her life with a revealing analysis of the novels.
Art & Photography
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