Renault, Mary - The Nature of Alexander (1975 1st. ed)

Renault, Mary - The Nature of Alexander

London, Allen Lane, 1975, first edition

Hardcover. Blue cloth. Title in silver on the spine. With Dust Jacket and illustrated endpapers (scan 3)
19,5 x 25,5 x 2,5 cm.
240 Pages

AS GOOD AS NEW
Two tears in the backside ot the dust jacket

With lots of illustrations in colour and in black & white
And a double foulded coloured map, depicting Alexander’s empire at the time of his death in 323 BC (scan 14)

The Nature of Alexander by Mary Renault is another superb chronicle of the life of Alexander The Great. She has written many books about the greatest general of all time (most in the historical fiction category). While there is not very much “new” in this book, it is nonetheless an excellent read, due to Renault’s ability to stick with her theme (his nature) throughout, her take down of stuffy ancient historians, and explain how to interpret his successes and failures through the prism of her take on the varied aspects of Alexander’s character or “nature”.

She handles the lack of direct evidence of Alexander’s bi-sexuality (or more correctly, his homosexuality) with tact and respect for the missing information. And yet, as the the story advances, Renault becomes increasingly brave in what many believe is merely stating the “obvious”. Alexander was gay. She literally asserts this “unproven” aspect of Alexander by about half way through the text. Good for her. And even better for Alexander and his legacy. It is not just wishful thinking that the vast majority of modern day people view Alexander through the looking glass of his homosexuality.

Hephaestion fills many of the pages, as he should, as Alexander’s companion, greatest friend, and lover for nearly 20 years. It’s really too bad that more is not known about Hephaestion, for he was (or seems to have been) as complex, intelligent and driven as Alexander (and likely even more handsome). His untimely early death caused Alexander the greatest pain, distress and grief of his life. He built a massive and stunning 200-foot high pyre on which to cremate him. Many believe that Alexander’s own untimely death a few months later was at least in part due to a broken heart, never to mend from his unfathomable loss of Hephaestion.

Mary Renault (1905-1983) was best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece with their vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great.
Born in London in 1905 and educated at the University of Oxford, she trained as a nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary where she met her lifelong partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. After completing her training she wrote her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1937. In 1948, after her novel North Face won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa.
It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time - in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer , published in 1953, and then in her first historical novel, 1956's The Last of the Wine, the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes. Her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership.

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