| Mary Renault |
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LIFE AND WORKS She was born in London and 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". {Link without Title} In 1948, after her novel ''North Face'' won a 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 , and her portrait of Alexander has been criticized as uncritical and romanticized. {Link without Title} 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. On April 18th, 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. BIBLIOGRAPHY Contemporary fiction
Historical novels
Nonfiction
Radio ''The King Must Die'' and ''The Bull From the Sea'' have been adapted as an 11-part BBC Radio 4 serial entitled ''The King Must Die''. EXTERNAL LINKS
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