Mary Renault
In 1948, Mary Renault made the move from the United Kingdom to South Africa, a decision that shaped the remainder of her working life. She had been born on 4 September 1905 in Forest Gate, London, under the birth name Eileen Mary Challans, and was educated at Clifton High School before going on to St Hugh's College, Oxford.
After Oxford, Renault worked as a nurse as well as pursuing writing. She held citizenship in both the United Kingdom and South Africa, and her partner was Julie Mullard. Writing in English, she worked as a novelist, biographer, and writer, and it was during the 1950s that she devoted herself specifically to historical fiction — the genre most associated with her name. The pen name Mary Renault, rather than her birth name, became the identity she carried throughout her career.
Mary Renault died on 13 December 1983 in Cape Town. Her commitment to historical prose literature, which she took up fully in the 1950s, continued to define her output through the final decades of her life, and she is catalogued in the Library of Congress under the name Renault, Mary.
Quotes by Mary Renault
Mary Renault's insights on:
He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.
We are weary of ourselves, and have dreamed a king. If now the gods have sent us one, let us not ask him to be more than mortal.
I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.
It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.
Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.
They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature’s hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.
She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things.