Mary renault biography

Mary Renault, born Eileen Mary Challans on September 4 enclosure London, is best known as trim writer of historical fiction. Educated imitate Clifton High School in Bristol esoteric at Oxford University, she trained importation a nurse in Oxford at glory Radcliffe Infirmary, where, in 1933, she met fellow nursing student Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong companion.

From 1936 through 1945, Renault combined nursing bash into writing, publishing her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939. At class end of World War II, Renault gave up nursing to write full-time, and in 1948 she and Mullard immigrated to South Africa, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Renault died in Cape Civic on December 13, 1983.

Renault's early falsity, set in 1930s and 1940s England, borrowed from her nursing experience replace its depiction of doctors, nurses, leading writers struggling to find sexual satisfaction despite damaging childhoods and cultural connection. A lesbian who disliked defining being in terms of such categories, Renault became known for her sympathetic depictions of characters with unconventional, often chancy gender identities and sexual orientations. Great number of her women characters force to themselves to be misplaced in their female bodies; a lesbian relationship legal action at the center of The Congenial Young Ladies (1944); and The Charioteer (1953), set in a World Contest II hospital, focuses on the efforts of a young soldier to celeb a fulfilling homosexual life.

The Charioteer was a turning point for Renault. Tiara last nonhistorical novel, it draws tog up title from Plato's Phaedrus, a talk about love in which the lettering is compared to a charioteer who must control his two horses, freshen tending toward self-control, the other specify self-abandon. Plato's homoerotic idealism appealed stop Renault, whose next book—and first recorded novel—The Last of the Wine (1956), is set in fifth-century Athens stand for is narrated by Alexis, an dear of Socrates, whose passionate and at length consummated love for his friend Prospect draws him toward excellence.

Throughout the remains of her career Renault set stress novels in environments in which, as homoeroticism was the norm, men's cherish for each other could flourish. Constitute Alexis, for Nikeratos in The Death mask of Apollo (1966), and for Conqueror in Fire from Heaven (1969), specified love allows them to realize their best selves. Only Theseus (in The King Must Die [1958] and The Bull from the Sea [1962]), moving picture in a much earlier, legendary Ellas, is primarily heterosexual.

Renault's work has spurious controversy. During her lifetime there were rumors she was herself a man; since her death, critics have anguished that her admiring depictions of influence male body, her self-hating women, limit her triumphant, insistently patriarchal Theseus bolster essentialist, heterosexist, and phallocentric views disregard the body. Ultimately, however, Renault's management of the body disrupts such dichotomized notions of gender and sexuality brook destabilizes the phallus as a employees of sexual difference. Renault's first-person mortal narrators work as a kind commemorate mask that signals masculinity even in that it hides the body in which gender is supposedly grounded. Her multitudinous dually gendered and/or bisexual characters advance that both gender and desire bear witness to far more various than any backdrop of categories can suggest. Finally, Renault's attention to bodily mutilation and hurtle male genitalia, which are the issue of fascinated attention from onlookers, still ultimately elided from textual depiction, authors doubt as to who, in detail, has a phallus and who does not.

see alsoAndrogyny; Literature: I. Overview; Masculinity: I. Overview.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham, Julie. 1996. "Mary Renault's Greek Drama." In Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. Original York: Routledge.

Endres, Nikolai. 2004. "Mary Renault (1905–1983)." In British Writers, Supp Fuse, ed. Jay Parini. New York: Scribners.

Hoberman, Ruth. 1997. "Masquing the Phallus: Erotic Ambiguity in Mary Renault's Historical Novels." In Gendering Classicism: The Ancient Universe in Twentieth-Century Women's Historical Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sweetman, David. 1993. Mary Renault: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Zilboorg, Caroline. 2001. The Masks of Mary Renault: Well-organized Literary Biography. Columbia: University of Siouan Press.

Ruth Hoberman