David Sweetman was a BBC television producer who interviewed the novelist, Mary Renault, in 1982. Six years later he told her Iife-long friend and fellow nurse, Julie Mullard, that he wanted to write a biography. Fortunately, Miss Mullard agreed to help and her...

Mary Renault was a lesbian novelist who wrote nonhistorical and historical novels between 1939 and 1983. She was once thought to be a man as she exercised a predilection for writing primarily about male characters even while using seemingly male narrators in many of...

Miss Renault is able to write about ancient Greece as if she had been there. I don't know whether I admire this gift of hers more in the Theseus novels, where her imagination was free to build as it could on a meager foundation of facts, or in the Athenian novels, which might so easily have suffered from an excess of documentation…. The world Miss Renault shows us is sufficiently in harmony with the one we have read about in history books, and yet it is a world she has created…. As we f...

[Mary Renault] has chosen to write a story for children about the Greeks defying the Persian empire ["The Lion in the Gateway"] and there is never any question about the purpose of the story. She tells it freshly, exultantly, as though it had never been told before. She has caught Herodotus's trick of making her heroes a little larger than life. She has a proper respect for Persian opulence and magnificence, and when she describes Darius or Xerxes she paints them in rainbow colors; and ...

Despite her bibliographies and factual afterwords, Miss Renault setting out to re-create a Greek reality isn't your ordinary taxidermist, intent on matching the colors of the glass eyes. No, she's a male impersonator…. Classical Greece, where homoerotic relations were unencumbered by moral disesteem, has set her imagination free repeatedly….