But writing had taken hold, and her next two books, both published during WWII, were written in after hours time.
2 The next spring she was among those who treated the Dunkirk evacuees, and as war continued she also worked in Radcliffe Infirmary’s brain surgery ward. Her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939) was a hospital romance, and it appeared under the pseudonym Mary Renault. Mary began working as a nurse after graduation, and her off-duty hours were filled with writing. It was here that she met fellow trainee Julie Mullard, who was to be her lifelong companion. Her studies eventually resulted in a nursing degree in 1936 but something more important happened before that. In 1933, well enough to leave for a walking holiday in the Cotswolds, she ended up back at Oxford, where at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary she decided to become a nurse. The result, however, since she didn’t have much of an allowance to live on, was malnutrition and rheumatic fever, and she finally wound up living back at her parents’ home for a year to rest. Mary got her degree in English in 1928 and set out to live independently, disappointing society and parents by not getting married and settling down to domestic bliss. Also, living with a relative of the discoverer of the Minoan Palace of Knossos, she discovered a lifelong devotion to the worlds of ancient Crete, Macedon, and Greece (richly nourished by time spent in the Ashmolean Museum). Her Oxford education did clearly stimulate a love for Plato that had begun when she was younger. Tolkien – was to become a teacher (because of his influence, while there she wrote a novel set in medieval times but she burned the manuscript because she felt it lacked authenticity). Hugh’s College, Oxford – a college for women, where one of the tutors was J.R.R.
Whether her comfortable childhood and boarding school education meant loving parental support or continually expressed disappointment, Mary grew up a bookish, introverted child. When Eileen Mary Challans was born in 1905 in Essex (now a part of Greater London), homosexuality really could only be publicly mentioned with repulsion (it wasn’t until 1967 that homosexual behavior was decriminalized between males in England and Wales – it was never criminal for females – and another six years before the American Psychiatric Association declassified it as a mental disorder). When President Kennedy was once asked who his favorite author was, he replied, “Mary Renault.” The Mary Renault Society, a group centered on the Triangle area of North Carolina, is named after a writer who created extraordinary historical novels and at the same time fostered societal tolerance towards homosexuality.
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