Eileen Mary Challans, known by her pen name Mary Renault, was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in ancient Greece.
24 Facts About Mary Renault
2.
Mary Renault devoted herself to writing historical fiction in the 1950s, which were her most successful books.
3.
Mary Renault is best known for her historical fiction today.
4.
Mary Renault's books attracted a large gay following at the time of their publication, when few mainstream works depicted homosexuality in a positive light.
5.
Mary Renault's work has had a generally positive reception by critics.
6.
Mary Renault has received numerous awards and honours, both during her lifetime and posthumously.
7.
Eileen Mary Renault Challans was born on 4 September 1905 at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex.
8.
Mary Renault was the eldest daughter of a physician Frank Challans and Mary Clementine Newsome Baxter Challans, known as Clementine.
9.
Mary Renault's mother was "a desperately aspirational housewife whose favourite word was 'nice'".
10.
Mary Renault had one younger sister, Francis Joyce Challans, who Mary always felt was the favourite daughter.
11.
Mary Renault's parents had a contentious relationship, and her father was neglectful of his children.
12.
Mary Renault relied on the Loeb Classical Library to read Greek and Latin texts with English translation.
13.
Mary Renault began attending St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college, in 1924.
14.
Mary Renault graduated with an undergraduate degree in English in 1928.
15.
Mary Renault began her training in 1933 at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.
16.
Challans worked as a nurse while writing her first novel, Purposes of Love, using the pseudonym Mary Renault to keep her writing secret should it meet with disapproval.
17.
Mary Renault chose this pseudonym from Froissart's Chronicles and used it for the entirety of her professional literary career.
18.
Mary Renault had a mutual admiration for the novelist Patrick O'Brian, with whom she exchanged letters.
19.
Mary Renault died in Cape Town on 13 December 1983.
20.
Mary Renault attributed this hesitancy to the rise of McCarthyism in the United States.
21.
Mary Renault's work was critically acclaimed for the meticulously researched historical detail she included.
22.
Mary Renault's sympathetic treatment of love between men won her a wide gay readership, and led to rumours that Challans was a gay man writing under a female pseudonym.
23.
Mary Renault has been cited as an inspiration by novelists such as Douglas Stuart and Kate Forsyth.
24.
The Mary Renault Prize is offered at St Hugh's College, Challans' alma mater.