Mary Renault

by David Sweetman

"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 "She began as a bookish, withdrawn child of disappointed parents and became a standard-bearer of the sexual revolution.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