The Masks of Mary Renault

The Masks of Mary Renault PDF Author: Caroline Zilboorg
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263178
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She received a degree in English from St. Hugh's College in Oxford in 1928, but she chose not to pursue an academic career. Instead, she decided to attend the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she trained to be a nurse. With the outbreak of the Second World War, she was assigned to the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and briefly worked with Dunkirk evacuees. She went on to work in the Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward and was there until 1945. It was during her nurse's training that Renault met Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong companion. This important lesbian relationship both resolved and posed many problems for Renault, not the least of which was how she was to write about issues at once intensely personal and socially challenging. In 1939, Renault published her first novel under a pseudonym in order to mask her identity. It was a time when she was struggling not only with her vocation (nursing and writing), but also with her sexual identity in the social and moral context of English life during the war. In 1948, Renault left England with Mullard for South Africa and never returned. It was in South Africa that she made the shift from her early contemporary novels of manners to the mature historical novels of Hellenic life. The classical settings allowed Renault to mask material too explosive to deal with directly while simultaneously giving her an "academic" freedom to write about subjects vital to her—among them war, peace, career, women's roles, female and male homosexuality, and bisexuality. Renault's reception complicates an understanding of her achievement, for she has a special status within the academic community, where she is both widely read and little written about. Her interest in sexuality and specifically in homosexuality and bisexuality, in fluid gender roles and identities, warrants a rereading and reevaluation of her work. Eloquently written and extensively researched, The Masks of Mary Renault will be of special value to anyone interested in women's studies or English literature.

The Masks of Mary Renault

The Masks of Mary Renault PDF Author: Caroline Zilboorg
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263178
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She received a degree in English from St. Hugh's College in Oxford in 1928, but she chose not to pursue an academic career. Instead, she decided to attend the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she trained to be a nurse. With the outbreak of the Second World War, she was assigned to the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and briefly worked with Dunkirk evacuees. She went on to work in the Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward and was there until 1945. It was during her nurse's training that Renault met Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong companion. This important lesbian relationship both resolved and posed many problems for Renault, not the least of which was how she was to write about issues at once intensely personal and socially challenging. In 1939, Renault published her first novel under a pseudonym in order to mask her identity. It was a time when she was struggling not only with her vocation (nursing and writing), but also with her sexual identity in the social and moral context of English life during the war. In 1948, Renault left England with Mullard for South Africa and never returned. It was in South Africa that she made the shift from her early contemporary novels of manners to the mature historical novels of Hellenic life. The classical settings allowed Renault to mask material too explosive to deal with directly while simultaneously giving her an "academic" freedom to write about subjects vital to her—among them war, peace, career, women's roles, female and male homosexuality, and bisexuality. Renault's reception complicates an understanding of her achievement, for she has a special status within the academic community, where she is both widely read and little written about. Her interest in sexuality and specifically in homosexuality and bisexuality, in fluid gender roles and identities, warrants a rereading and reevaluation of her work. Eloquently written and extensively researched, The Masks of Mary Renault will be of special value to anyone interested in women's studies or English literature.

The Masks of Mary Renault

The Masks of Mary Renault PDF Author: Caroline Zilboorg
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826213227
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy."--BOOK JACKET.

The Mask of Apollo

The Mask of Apollo PDF Author: Mary Renault
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Praise Singer

The Praise Singer PDF Author: Mary Renault
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 1405526246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
'Mary Renault's portraits of the ancient world are fierce, complex and eloquent, infused at every turn with her life-long passion for the Classics. Her characters live vividly both in their own time, and in ours' MADELINE MILLER Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us' HILARY MANTEL In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century. 'There's much to say about her interweaving of myth and history and, just as interestingly, there's much to wonder at in the way she fills in the large dark spaces where we know next to nothing about the times she describes . . . an important and wonderful writer . . . she set a course into serious-minded, psychologically intense historical fiction that today seems more important than ever' - Sam Jordison, Guardian

The Charioteer

The Charioteer PDF Author: Mary Renault
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480432857
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
A WWII soldier embarks on affairs with two very different men in a landmark novel that “transcends categorizations” (The Telegraph). After being wounded at Dunkirk in World War II, Laurie Odell is sent back home to a rural British hospital. Standing out among the orderlies is Andrew, a bright conscientious objector raised as a Quaker. The unspoken romance between the two men is tested when Ralph, a friend of Laurie’s from school, re-enters his life, introducing him into a milieu of jaded, experienced gay men. Will Laurie reconcile himself to Ralph’s embrace, or can he offer Andrew the idealized, Platonic intimacy he yearns for? This novel has been called one of the foundation stones of gay literary fiction, ranking alongside James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Celebrated for its literary brilliance and sincere depiction of complex human emotions, The Charioteer is a stirring and beautifully rendered portrayal of love. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary Renault including rare images of the author.

The Wine-Dark Sea (Vol. Book 16) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

The Wine-Dark Sea (Vol. Book 16) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels) PDF Author: Patrick O'Brian
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393063690
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The sixteenth volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series, and Patrick O'Brian's first bestseller in the United States. At the outset of this adventure filled with disaster and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pursue an American privateer through the Great South Sea. The strange color of the ocean reminds Stephen of Homer's famous description, and portends an underwater volcanic eruption that will create a new island overnight and leave an indelible impression on the reader's imagination. Their ship, the Surprise, is now also a privateer, the better to escape diplomatic complications from Stephen's mission, which is to ignite the revolutionary tinder of South America. Jack will survive a desperate open boat journey and come face to face with his illegitimate black son; Stephen, caught up in the aftermath of his failed coup, will flee for his life into the high, frozen wastes of the Andes; and Patrick O'Brian's brilliantly detailed narrative will reunite them at last in a breathtaking chase through stormy seas and icebergs south of Cape Horn, where the hunters suddenly become the hunted.

THE LAST OF THE WINE

THE LAST OF THE WINE PDF Author: MARY RENAULT
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness PDF Author: Radclyffe Hall
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473374081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

Paradise Reclaimed

Paradise Reclaimed PDF Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307427234
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
From the Nobel Prize winner comes a captivating novel about an idealistic Icelandic farmer who journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise. • "Full of an earthy poetry...a style wonderfully wise and entirely Scandinavian in its combination of magic and reality." —The New York Times Book Review • With an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-century Iceland with his wife and two adoring young children. But when he impulsively offers his children's beloved pure-white pony to the visiting King of Denmark, he sets in motion a chain of disastrous events that leaves his family in ruins and himself at the other end of the earth, optimistically building a home for them among the devout polygamists in the Promised Land of Utah. By the time the broken family is reunited, Laxness has spun his trademark blend of compassion and comically brutal satire into a moving and spellbinding enchantment, composed equally of elements of fable and folkore and of the most humble truths.

Clea

Clea PDF Author: Lawrence Durrell
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453261443
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
DIVDIVThe final installment of the Alexandria Quartet, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “one of the most important works of our time”/divDIV /divDIVYears after his liaisons with Justine and Melissa, Darley becomes immersed in a relationship with Clea, a bisexual artist. The ensuing chain of events transforms not only the lovers, but the dead as well, and leads to the series’ brilliant and unexpected resolution. /divDIV /divDIVPraised by Life as among the “most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time,” Clea carries on Durrell’s assured and unwavering style, and confirms the series’ standing as a resounding masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris./div /div