The classical fiction of Mary Renault opened Bettany Hughes’s eyes to the hardcore, drug-saturated sensuality of the ancient world
Renault’s novels are 'a kind of dance with antiquity’ Photo: Alamy/Corbis
As a teenager, on bone-chilling English beaches, I had a guilty pleasure. Wrapped in towels and sheltering behind wind-worn breakwaters, I smuggled on to the shingle something that would transport me elsewhere, where I would be warmed by a breeze, rushed upon by monsters and demons, protected by flawed boy-kings and kohl-eyed high priestesses.
The potent object was a book by one Eileen Mary Challans, nom de plume Mary Renault. I would wait anxiously for the next title – wrapped in opaque plastic by the careful hands of the Hythe librarian – to be returned by the phalanx of nut-brown, silver-haired Army widows who seemed to occupy this Kentish seaside town.
With the hubris of youth I thought all this hot joy was my own, unaware that, in fact, across the world, others were similarly enchanted. A global bestseller by 1970, with eight Greek-themed historical novels and six contemporary ones, Renault has been praised by Hilary Mantel as “a shining light”. Simon Russell Beale recalls being “bewitched” by his first Renault experience. Sarah Waters judges her 1972 novel The Persian Boy to be “one of the greatest historical novels ever written”.
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