Meticulously researched, her work reached a broad international readership, and were popular selections for the Book of the Month Club (USA) and the Book Society (UK). The historical Grecian setting-where all her remaining novels were set-allowed her to write queer characters who no longer faced social or political opprobrium for their relationships. Set in Ancient Greece, the novel follows two lovers, Alexias and Lysis, during the political upheavals at the end of the Peloponnesian War. But it was in The Last of the Wine (1956) that Renault discovered the setting with which she would become most closely associated. Then followed her ground-breaking novel The Charioteer (1953), which tells the story of a wounded WWII soldier who falls in love with a conscientious objector. She won the $150,000 (£37,000) MGM Award for her novel Return to Night (1947), after which she and her partner, Julie Mullard, moved to South Africa. Her first novel Purposes of Love ( Promise of Love in the USA), a hospital romance about a bixsexual love-triangle, was published in 1939 by Longmans, Green & Co.
Born in England, she attended St Hugh’s College, Oxford, gaining (like Auden, her contemporary) a third in English, before training to become a nurse. Mary Renault (1905-1983) was a highly influential author of novels featuring gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters-many written during a time period in which queer people faced extreme legal and social pressures.
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