Mary Renault: The Earlier Novels

Abstract

Mary Renault [Eileen Mary Challans], who died in December 1983, wrote eight historical novels. Three of the last four make a sequence about Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven (1970), The Persian Boy (1972) and Funeral Games (1981). The Last of the Wine (1956) is set in Athens in the period of the Peloponnesian War; The Mask of Apollo (1966) is set partly in Athens in the next generation, partly in Sicily under Dionysios the Younger and afterwards Dion. The King Must Die (1958) and The Bull from the Sea (1962) retell the story of Theseus. The Praise Singer (1979) is a fictional life of the poet Simonides. These books are traditional in their use of the formal and linguistic resources at the disposal of a modern novelist, which is not to say that they are unadventurous in technique. Six are autobiographies which proceed from childhood onwards without dislocation of the time-scheme or variation in the perspective of a lifetime remembered in orderly detail. The novels follow ancient sources closely and where gaps occur in what is known, the author’s reconstruction is based on rational discussion of probability. Historical materials very rarely intrude.