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Mary Renault (;〔"She always pronounced it 'Ren-olt', though almost everyone would come to speak of her as if she were a French car." 〕 4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983), born Eileen Mary Challans,〔 was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander. ==Biography== Born at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex (now in London), Renault was educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford, then an all-women's college, receiving an undergraduate degree in English in 1928. In 1933 she began training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. During her training she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a lifelong 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 has a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, and the novelist Linda Proud has described it as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance". Her novel ''The Friendly Young Ladies'' (1943), which is about a lesbian relationship between a writer and a nurse, seems to have been inspired by her own relationship with Mullard. In 1948, after her novel ''Return to Night'' won an MGM prize worth $150,000, Renault and Mullard immigrated to South Africa, where they remained for the rest of their lives. 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."〔 However, both Renault and Mullard were critical of the less liberal aspects of their new home, and participated in the Black Sash movement against apartheid in the 1950s. Shortly before her death, Mary was listed as one of the famous alumnae who had brought the Radcliffe Infirmary Nurses' Home much honor. Due to the especially wet winter of 1983 in Cape Town, Mary picked up a small cough. At first, the cough was no more than a mild irritant for Mary, but it soon "become a persistent, hacking attempt to clear her lungs and catch her breath." After Julie voiced her fears to their mutual friend Dr. Sonnenberg, x-rays were performed, and Mary was diagnosed with pneumonia and was directed to a nursing home. After failing to eliminate the pneumonia with antibiotics, a visiting British surgeon performed a bronchoscopy under general anesthetic. Shortly after, the doctor revealed to Julie that he had "found fluid on the lung and had aspirated some it: the cause was cancer." Julie begged the doctors to say nothing to Mary unless she demanded to be told. By October, a friend of Dr. Sonnenber, Dr. Slome, was draining off liquid twice a week and was convinced that there was a pocket he could not reach. Mary was then put on oxygen in order to ease her breathing. On December 12, 1983, as a last hope, the doctors wanted to inject a new chemical into the pleura early the next morning in the hope that it would stop further fluid from forming. Before the operation even began, Julie received a phone call, which she knew "could only mean one thing". Mary Renault died in Cape Town on December 13, 1983. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mary Renault」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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