It says a lot about a book that you feel a terrible sadness as you approach the final pages. Even classicists have found her depiction of the physical and spiritual ambiance of Ancient Greece so accurate as to be uncanny. While The King Must Die and the Alexandrian books may have had a stronger impact, it is the delicacy of the relationship between the young lovers portrayed in The Last of the Wine that remains with me.īecause of her empathetic portrayal of love between men, many of Mary Renault’s fans, including myself, suspected the author was actually a man.

Although I read them all as a teenager, many years ago, their beauty and humanity are still a strong influence. I cannot remember how I discovered Mary Renault’s novels, but most likely at my local library which I haunted. until 1959, after the success of The Last of the Wine proved that American readers and critics would accept a serious gay love story. The Charioteer could not be published in the U.S. Instead she was free to focus on larger ethical and philosophical concerns, while examining the nature of love and leadership. By turning away from the 20th century and focusing on stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social 'problems'. In a sense, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, is a warm-up for Renault's historical novels.

They include a pair of novels about the mythological hero Theseus and a trilogy about the career of Alexander the Great. Her historical novels are all 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. Mary Renault was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece.

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault