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Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She ...
The author of The Charioteer and The King Must Die, Renault studied at Oxford but eventually abandoned the academic world and England for South Africa, where she and her companion, Julie Mullard, remained. "A superb biography of an exceptional novelist" (New Yorker). Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Index; photographs.
'One of the greatest historical novels ever written' SARAH WATERS 'I love to find queer representation in historical fiction. . . Renault's eye for intimacy is amazing' DOUGLAS STUART 'Fierce, complex and eloquent' MADELINE MILLER 'Mary Renault is a shining light' HILARY MANTEL *** A groundbreaking queer classic and powerful reimagining of the last years of Alexander the Great, told through the eyes of his lover. I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king. And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it. Bagoas, abducted as a boy and sold as a eunuch, has been transported to the heart of the Persian court as cour...
'The Alexander Trilogy contains some of Renault's finest writing. Lyrical, wise, compelling: the novels are a wonderful imaginative feat' SARAH WATERS In the final novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend. Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt to India. After Alexander's death in 323 B.C. his only direct heirs were two unborn sons and a simpleton half-brother. Every long-simmering faction exploded into the vacuum of power. Wives, distant relatives and generals all vied for the loyalty of the increasi...
'The Alexander Trilogy contains some of Renault's finest writing. Lyrical, wise, compelling: the novels are a wonderful imaginative feat' SARAH WATERS 'The Alexandriad is one of the twentieth century's most unexpectedly original works of art' GORE VIDAL In the first novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend. Alexander's beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son's loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengea...
An “intriguing and invaluable” biography of Alexander the Great by the novelist whose fiction redefined Ancient Greece (The New York Times). Acclaimed writer Mary Renault is widely known for her provocative historical novels of Alexander the Great and his lovers. But she also authored this nonfiction classic, a fresh, illuminating look at a man whose legend has remained larger than life for more than two thousand years. From his dysfunctional family dynamics to his molding under Aristotle, from his shocking rise to power at age twenty to the staggering violence of his military campaigns, Renault is clear-eyed about Alexander’s accomplishments and his flaws. Infectious in its enthusiasm, this is a penetrating study of an unrivaled conqueror, enduring icon, and fascinating man. Hailed as both “a splendid achievement in nonfiction” (The Plain Dealer) and “the perfect companion to her Alexander novels” (The Wall Street Journal), Renault’s engrossing and accessible biography stands alone in the pantheon of Alexander the Great literature. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary Renault including rare images of the author.
Best known for her historical novels--The Last of the Wine (1956), The King Must Die (1958), The Bull from the Sea (1962), The Mask of Apollo (1966), and Fire from Heaven (1969)--Mary Renault's works have often appeared to readers as collateral reading to Greek literature. She is, doubtless, one of the most creative historical novelists of our era and the only bona fide Hellenist in twentieth-century fiction. What is less well known is that Mary Renault's earlier works, written between 1939and 1953--among them Promise of Love (1939), Return to Night (1947), and The Charioteer (1953)--were contemporary pieces, not concerned with antiquity. Covering the entire range of Miss Renault's work, Bernard Dick's penetrating study analyzes the early works and shows they were filled with classical allusions and dominated by Greek ideals of friendship.
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'Mary Renault's portraits of the ancient world are fierce, complex and eloquent, infused at every turn with her life-long passion for the Classics. Her characters live vividly both in their own time, and in ours' MADELINE MILLER Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us' HILARY MANTEL In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when ty...
Elsie, sheltered and naive, is seventeen and unhappy. Stifled by life with her bickering parents in a bleak Cornish village, she falls in love with the first presentable young man she meets - Peter, an ambitious London doctor. On his advice she runs away from home and goes to live with her sister Leonora, who escaped eight years earlier. But there are surprises in store for conventional Elsie as her sister has a rather bohemian lifestyle: not only does Leo live in a houseboat on the Thames where she writes Westerns for a living, she shares her boat - and her bed - with Helen. When Peter pays a visit, turning his attention from one 'friendly young lady' to the next, he disturbs the calm for each of them - with results unforeseen by all . . . Mary Renault wrote this delightfully provocative novel in 1943 partly in answer to the despair characteristic of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. The result is this witty and stylish social comedy.