She was born at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road,
Forest Gate, Essex, (now
Greater London). She was educated at
St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college, receiving a degree in English in 1928. In 1933, she began training as a
nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. During her training, she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a life-long romantic relationship.
She worked as a nurse while beginning a writing career, treating
Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol, and working in Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward until 1945. She published her first novel,
Purposes of Love, in 1939; it had a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, which novelist Linda Proud described as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance".
In 1948, after her novel
Return to Night won a
MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to
South Africa. There, according to Proud, they found a community of gay expatriates who had "escaped the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain for the comparatively liberal atmosphere of
Durban.... Mary and Julie found themselves able to set up home together in this new land without causing the outrage they had sometimes provoked at home." (Renault and Mullard were critical of the less liberal aspects of their new home, participating in the
Black Sash movement against
apartheid in the 1950s.)
It was in
South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about
homosexual relationships for the first time — in her last contemporary novel,
The Charioteer, published in 1953, and then in her first historical novel, 1956's
The Last of the Wine, the story of two young
Athenians who study under
Socrates and fight against
Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes; her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership.
Her subsequent historical novels were all set in
ancient Greece, including a pair of novels about the mythological hero
Theseus, and a trilogy about the career of
Alexander the Great. Although not a
classicist by training, she was admired in her day for her scrupulous recreations of the Greek world. Some of the history presented in her fiction (and in her nonfiction work,
The Nature of Alexander) has been called into question: her novels about Theseus rely on the controversial theories of
Robert Graves, and her portrait of Alexander has been criticized as uncritical and romanticized. Renault often defends her interpretation of the available sources in author's notes attached to her books, and even her critics generally credit her with providing a vivid portrait of life in ancient Greece. Her narrative style combines evocative imagery with a perceptive understanding of personalities and motivations.
On
April 18, 2006, UK, BBC 4 aired a one hour documentary,
Mary Renault – Love and War in Ancient Greece, with this description:
:A profile of the novelist whose books on ancient Greece convincingly brought the world of Plato and Socrates back to life. Sue MacGregor and
Oliver Stone are among the contributors to this film examining how Mary Renault's popular novels set in ancient Greece inspired a new generation of readers in the 1950s.
