After graduating from St Hugh's with a Third Class in English,[4] she worked as a nurse and began writing her first novels, which were contemporary romances.

In 1948, she moved to Durban, South Africa with her partner, Julie Mullard, and later to Cape Town, where she spent the rest of her life.

Living in South Africa allowed her to write about openly gay characters without fearing the censorship and homophobia of England.

Her books attracted a large gay following at the time of their publication, when few mainstream works depicted homosexuality in a positive light.

[3] Eileen Mary Challans was born on 4 September 1905 at Dacre Lodge, 49 Plashet Road, Forest Gate, Essex.

Tolkien, who encouraged her to write a novel set in medieval times, but she burned the manuscript because she felt it lacked authenticity.

[3] Despite the mores of the time and the fact that Mullard had received an offer of marriage from one of her male lovers, they were determined to be a couple.

[18][3] In 1948, after winning an MGM prize worth £37,000 for Return to Night, Challans was able to leave nursing and devote herself to writing full time.

[3] Challans and Mullard emigrated to Durban, South Africa, which was home to a community of gay and lesbian expatriates who had left the more sexually repressive environments of Britain and the United States.

[10] However, Challans was occasionally disillusioned with the Black Sash on account of its insufficiently radical leanings, such as when it refused to protest against the implementation of anti-homosexuality laws in 1968.

[22] Her earlier British reputation as a writer of sensationalist bestsellers faded, and in 1983 she was listed as one of the famous alumnae who had brought honour to the Radcliffe Infirmary Nurses' Home.

It tells the story of two young gay servicemen in the 1940s who try to model their relationship on the ideals expressed in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium.

[28] Hierarchical relationships, involving age gaps or differences in social status, are frequently explored in Challans' novels.

[19] Challans' Return to Night, another hospital romance, explores the power dynamics between Hillary, a doctor, and a younger man with whom she has an affair.

[31] It was written during a period of time when male homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom, particularly under the policies implemented by David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir, who was Home Secretary from 1951 to 1954.

[32] Simon Russell Beale described its contemporary context as "that sombre, twilit world of the early 1950s, when so much of homosexual life was threaded through with fear of exposure.

[34] It was not published in the United States until 1959,[3] which made it a somewhat later addition to homosexual literature in the United States because American readers and critics had accepted serious gay love stories in such works as Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948).

[35] By turning away from the twentieth century and writing stories about male lovers in the warrior societies of ancient Greece, Renault no longer had to deal with homosexuality and anti-gay prejudice as social "problems".

Daniel Mendelsohn said that both her "contemporary and the Greek novels feature unsettling depictions of bad marriages and, particularly, of nightmarishly passive-aggressive wives and mothers.

[43] Noël Coward's reception of Challans' work and her portrayal of homosexual relationships in particular was less warm: I have also read The Charioteer by Miss Mary Renault.

[45] Her novels about Theseus rely on the controversial theories of Robert Graves, and take liberties in depicting the society of ancient Crete.

Mary Beard and John Henderson observed Challans' novels create "in mythical prehistoric Crete [...] a weird 'other world', where a society free from 'our' inhibitions (particularly sexual) can be realized.

[47] Kevin Kopelson, Professor of English at the University of Iowa, felt that Challans "mischaracterise[d] pederastic relationships as heroic.

"[48] Defying centuries of admiration for Demosthenes as a great orator, Challans portrayed him as a cruel, corrupt and cowardly demagogue.

[11][3] At the time they were published, Challans' works were among the few novels to present love between persons of the same sex as a natural part of life, rather than a problem.

[54] Suzanne Collins said that The Hunger Games was partly inspired by The King Must Die, which reimagined Minos' Labyrinth as an arena where Athenian tributes had to fight for their lives to entertain the Cretan elite.

[55] Bernard Dick wrote The Hellenism of Mary Renault (1972), which analyzed the classical influences reflected in her corpus of work.

[56] An hour-long documentary about her life titled Mary Renault – Love and War in Ancient Greece was aired on BBC Four in 2006.

It starred Gary Bond (Theseus), John Westbrook (Pittheus), Frances Jeater (queen of Eleusis), Carole Boyd (Aithra), Alex Jennings (Amyntor), Sarah Badel, David March and Christopher Guard.

[60] The Charioteer was adapted into a ten-episode serial for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime, read by Anton Lesser and produced by Clive Brill, which was broadcast over two weeks from 25 November 2013.