Mary Renault wrote so sympathetically and with such candour about the male world of Ancient Greece that many readers believed the author of The Last of the Wine and The Persian Boy must be a man. In reality, Mary Renault was a pseudonym for a surprising and intensely private woman born in a genteel London suburb. Hers was a life of marked contrasts and adventurous changes. She began as a bookish, withdrawn child of disappointed parents and became a standard bearer of the sexual revolution. A seemingly conventional Englishwoman who loved the English countryside, in 1947 she embarked for South Africa with her lifelong friend, Julie Mullard, never to return. David Sweetman combines her richly textured life and an analysis of the novels with an unusual love story.