Mary Renault Classical Reception Essay Competition

2024 Mary Renault Prize Winners

Winners

Alicia Dransfield – St Albans Girls’ School, St Albans (Year 12)

“…the universe expands to fill the self”: The Reception of Dionysian Madness by Donna Tartt

Harriet Huxley – Reigate College, Reigate (Year 12)

A Cowardly, Ironic Idol: Orpheus in the Elizabethan Renaissance

Edward Thomson – Winchester College, Winchester (Year 12)

Cu Chulainn: A Homeric Hero?

Jessica Yang – Westminster School, London (Year 12)

“quis furor?”: Sympathetically Appraising the Reception of the Aeneid in Lucan’s Pharsalia

Highly Commended

Lucy Cochran – Wellington College, Crowthorne (Year 12)

Classical origins of the grotesque: reception of the Hippolytus-Phaedra myth in Sarah Kane’s ‘Phaedras love’

Lilla Datta – King’s College School, London (Year 12)

Hadestown: Jazzing up the Underworld

Rowan Edwards – King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham (Year 12)

Yearning for open frontiers and open-necked shirts: Greek reception in Victorian Britain and the perception of queer identity

Ben Woodward – King Edward’s School, Birmingham (Year 13)

The Reception of Homer in Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Penelopiad’

Who was Mary Renault?

This biography below is taken from the St Hugh’s College exhibition, recently on show in the Howard Piper Library.

‘Eileen Mary Challans was born on 4th Sept 1905, the daughter of Frank Challans, a medical practitioner. She attended Romford House School, Forest Gate, and Clifton High School, Bristol before matriculating at St Hugh’s in Oct 1925 to read English Language and Literature, obtaining a BA (III) in 1928.

During her time at St Hugh’s, she developed a love of ancient Greece, Crete and Macedon – a setting which resurfaced in many of her novels. Although she had initially intended to become a teacher, in 1933, after a period of illness, she returned to Oxford and became a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary, obtaining a nursing degree in 1936. Here she met her lifelong partner, Julie Mullard.

She published her first novel, a hospital romance called Purposes of Love, in 1939, under the pseudonym Mary Renault, the name by which she became known. She continued to write and publish whilst nursing during WWII and her novels developed overtly homosexual themes, which she treated honestly and sympathetically. Her sixth and last non-historical novel, The Charioteer, was published in 1953. Mary moved on to writing historical novels set in Ancient Greece, eventually publishing eight, the first being The Last of the Wine in 1956 and the last Funeral Games in 1981.

Although her portrayals of homosexuality provoked outrage in British society at the time, MGM presented her an award for her 4th novel, Return to Night, and she was able to afford to emigrate with Julie to South Africa in 1948, never to return to England. They both became South African citizens and were involved in the early anti-apartheid movement.’