by Mary Renault
Again echoing Radclyffe Hall, Renault describes Leo’s body as masculine: Very much like Stephen Gordon’s, it is “straight, firm, and confident … [with] small, high breasts, straight shoulders and narrow hips.” However, while Hall attributes Stephen’s physical masculinity to “congenital sexual inversion” (which is supposed to explain too the instinctive sexual repulsion Stephen feels for men and the desire she feels only for women), Renault makes no connection between Leo’s boyish body and her sexual desires, which have no exclusive object. If Leo has been repelled by heterosexuality it was not because she was born an invert, but rather because she witnessed and was disgusted by her parents’ conflictual relationship. By presenting Leo’s similarities to the mannish Stephen Gordon as well as her crucial differences, Renault seems to argue quite intentionally that, counter to Radclyffe Hall’s convictions, sexuality is far from a simple matter of congenital load.
Just as Leo is a commentary on Stephen, Helen is a commentary on her counterpart in The Well of Loneliness, Stephen’s lover, Mary. Like Mary, Helen is entirely feminine, a pretty woman who wears “pretty nightgowns” and knows how to apply powder and rouge, in contrast to Leo who “pull[s] a lipstick out of her pocket [and] line[s] her mouth with a few brisk strokes.” In her relations, Helen is nurturing, womanly. She is indistinguishable from the prototypical femme figure who—not only in Radclyffe Hall’s novel but also in most of the mid-twentieth-century lesbian pulps—must leave a butch like Leo and run to the arms of a real man before the last page. But in The Friendly Young Ladies Renault turns the tables. She is playing with the possibility of sexualities that are well outside of Hall’s rigid categories of the “true congenital invert” and the feminine woman whose homosexuality is “merely a phase”: She presents the womanly Helen as having little interest in heterosexuality—she tried it and she didn’t like it (despite her being depicted at a party as “tucked into the arm of a large, athletic young man”). The masculine Leo, however, is sexually fulfilled only once she finally goes to bed with Joe. In the defection of one member of the lesbian couple to heterosexuality, Renault again seems to echo Radclyffe Hall only to subvert the predictability she despised. It is Renault’s femme who is certain of her lesbian status; it is her butch who will, apparently, go off with a man.
Although Renault had no interest in contemporary theories that isolated the individual from “the herd” on the basis of his or her sexuality, it is astonishingly easy to find in The Friendly Young Ladies passages that resonate very well with both lesbian-feminism and queer theory. Renault eschewed the feminist movement as well as the gay-and-lesbian movement, oversimplifying feminism in her claim that its notions about gender and sexuality were not complex enough to fit her, and that “my inner persona occupied two sexes too indiscriminately to take part in a sex war.”5 Nevertheless, Helen’s incisive analysis of male-female relations as she experienced them—which is intended to explain her preference for women—might easily have been written by a lesbian-feminist of the 1970s. Helen chose to leave heterosexuality not because she had an unsatisfactory sexual relationship with the man with whom she lived (the sex part of their relationship was fine, she insists), but rather because he was domineering, inconsiderate, selfish, insensitive—in short, the whole litany of complaints with which lesbian-feminism charged men:
He was just a cad to live with. Things like wanting all the space for his own work and not leaving me any room for mine. Or time. I don’t think he liked, really, seeing me work at all. I was better at it than he was, that might have been one reason why. Between women, you see, an issue like that is bound to come out straightforwardly, but a man can cover it up for ages. And then, he thought I ought to like his friends but he needn’t like mine. If I had a cold or a headache or wasn’t feeling bright for the usual sort of reasons, he just used to go out; it never occurred to him to do anything else. Leo isn’t any more domesticated than most men, but she isn’t above filling you a hot-water bottle and fussing you up a bit. … Finally he tried to make me have a baby so I’d have to [marry him]. He said it was for my good. I was tired of arguing by then so I just packed and went. I expect he’s scratching his head about it still.
Joe, the man to whom Leo will apparently go by the conclusion, carrying “her manuscript, portable typewriter, and an armful of essential books,” is not at all like the head-scratcher. He clearly respects her work as a writer, a profession they share, and he understands that she needs space and privacy for that work, just as he does. “I can work any place where there’s a door that shuts, and so can you,” he tells Leo. He is the evolved man that feminists of the 1970s cried for. Many of them, observing that such men were rare and, like Helen, despairing that testosterone made the behaviors she complains of practically inevitable—made choices just like hers.
Postmodernist readers too will find much that is of interest in The Friendly Young Ladies. Although Renault would undoubtedly have been horrified by the term, her ideas are not at all discordant with “queer theory.” Like queer theorists, Renault questions easy assumptions about the connection between gender identification and sexual orientation, as is seen in her feminine Helen’s commitment to homosexuality and her masculine Leo’s ostensible assumption of heterosexuality. Furthermore, though Renault would not have coined a phrase such as “gender is performance,” in the instance of Leo, who can look like a teenage boy but can also look attractively feminine when she wishes (as she does dressed for the houseboat party), Renault presents a fine illustration of Judith Butler’s concept, central to queer theory, of the performativity of gender.
Renault also scoffs at notions about the hardwiring of sexual orientation, such as were propounded by nineteenth-century sexologists and embraced by Radclyffe Hall; and, again like queer theorists, she raises interesting questions about what constitutes sexual identity. Through her characters, Renault argues that sexuality is fluid and flexible: Norah, Peter’s nominal fiancée, is easily seduced by Leo; Helen enjoys heterosexual sex but prefers being with women because they’re more considerate; Leo lives for most of her life as a lesbian, fearing heterosexuality, and then falls in love with a man.
In the penultimate pages of the book, Renault seems to lapse into language that, in its patent essentialism, is a surprising departure from the rest of the novel. Standing in the moonlight with Joe, for instance, Leo is suddenly overwhelmed by “the consciousness of being a woman”; and after Leo decides she will go to Joe, Renault describes her weeping as being “release without humiliation; the tears of a woman.” However, Leo’s history calls into question the stability of her sudden womanliness. In fact, only moments before she weeps the “tears of a woman” she has been crying “like a beaten boy.” Thus, to the end, Leo remains a character much like her creator, whose “inner persona occupied two sexes.” Though Leo may gather her manuscript, typewriter, and essential books in preparation for exiting from her lesbian life, Renault hints at a very postmodern inconclusiveness: There is good reason to believe that she will be back.
Lillian Faderman
1In a letter from Mary Renault to Colin Spencer, September 20, 1967, quoted in Caroline Zilboorg, The Masks of Mary Renault: A Literary Biography (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 2.
2Kate O’Brien, Spectator, September 1, 1944, p. 204; Henry Reed, New Statesman and Nation, October 14, 1944, p. 256.
3David Sweetman, Mary Renault: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), pp. 104–105.
4Zilboorg, p. 216.
5Sweetman, pp. 252–53.
A Biography of Mary Renault
Mary Renault (1905–1983) was an English writer best known for her historical novels on the life of Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981).
Born Eileen Mary Challans into a middle-class family in a London suburb, Renault enjoyed reading from a young age. Initially obsessed with cowboy stories, she became interested in Greek philosophy when she found Plato’s works in
her school library. Her fascination with Greek philosophy led her to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where one of her tutors was J. R. R. Tolkien. Renault went on to earn her BA in English in 1928.
Renault began training as a nurse in 1933. It was at this time that she met the woman that would become her life partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Renault also began writing, and published her first novel, Purposes of Love (titled Promise of Love in its American edition), in 1939. Inspired by her occupation, her first works were hospital romances. Renault continued writing as she treated Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and later as she worked in a brain surgery ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary.
In 1947, Renault received her first major award: Her novel Return to Night (1946) won an MGM prize. With the $150,000 of award money, she and Mullard moved to South Africa, never to return to England again. Renault revived her love of ancient Greek history and began to write her novels of Greece, including The Last of the Wine (1956) and The Charioteer (1953), which is still considered the first British novel that includes unconcealed homosexual love.
Renault’s in-depth depictions of Greece led many readers to believe she had spent a great deal of time there, but during her lifetime, she actually only visited the Aegean twice. Following The Last of the Wine and inspired by a replica of a Cretan fresco at a British museum, Renault wrote The King Must Die (1958) and its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962).
The democratic ideals of ancient Greece encouraged Renault to join the Black Sash, a women’s movement that fought against apartheid in South Africa. Renault was also heavily involved in the literary community, where she believed all people should be afforded equal standard and opportunity, and was the honorary chair of the Cape Town branch of PEN, the international writers’ organization.
Renault passed away in Cape Town on December 13, 1983.
Renault in 1940.
Renault and Julie Mullard on board the Cairo in 1948, on their way to South Africa, where they settled in Durban.
Renault in a Black Sash protest in 1955. She was among the first to join this women’s movement against apartheid.
Renault and Michael Atkinson installing her cast of the Roman statue of the Apollo Belvedere in the garden of Delos, Camps Bay, in the late 1970s.
Renault working in her “Swiss Bank” study with Mandy and Coco, the dogs.
Renault and Mullard walking the dogs on the beach at Camps Bay in 1982.
Delos, Greece, with a view over the beach at Camps Bay.
Portrait of Renault in 1982.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1944 by Mary Renault
Copyright © renewed 1972 by Mary Renault
Afterword by Mary Renault copyright © 1984 by the Estate of Mary Renault
Afterword by Lillian Faderman copyright © 2003 by Lillian Faderman
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-3980-1
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