Mary Renault died on 13 December 1983 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she had lived for decades.
Mary Renault died on 13 December 1983 in Cape Town, South Africa, the country that had become her adopted home since emigrating from Britain in 1948. She had settled first in Durban and later in Cape Town, living for many years with her lifelong partner, Julie Mullard, a former nurse she had met while both were serving during the Second World War.
By the time of her death, Renault had established herself as one of the most acclaimed historical novelists of the twentieth century, celebrated particularly for her sequence of novels reimagining ancient Greece—including The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, and her celebrated trilogy on Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games. Her nonfiction study The Nature of Alexander (1975) further cemented her reputation as a serious historian as well as novelist.
Her death marked the end of a literary career that had profoundly influenced how readers and later novelists understood and portrayed same-sex relationships in antiquity, offering nuanced, historically informed narratives at a time when explicit literary treatment of homosexuality remained controversial. Her novels continued to be reprinted and studied long after her death, and she is remembered as a pioneering voice in both historical fiction and LGBTQ+ literature.