Renault miscellany
I have this terrible fear that people will justifiably believe I have a one-track mind. Yet I also have interesting links and news to share. Here goes nothing...
As of yesterday, both Return to Night and Purposes of Love are back in print in the UK, in Virago Modern Classics editions! (For North Face and Kind Are Her Answers you'll have to wait till October... I'm sure you can't contain your excitement.)
In this interesting interview, Mary Renault's agent talks about the process of bringing her back catalogue back into print. Fascinating fact: she left her copyrights to St Hugh's College. Sadly missing information: why Open Road publishing left text out of the US e-books and gave the chapters such awful titles.
If you feel like being mildly infuriated, there's always a column about Mary Renault by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail (written in 2010). Mostly about the historicals:
Miss Renault also wrote a couple of cult books which must mainly appeal to homosexuals, 'The Charioteer' and the wonderfully-titled 'The Friendly Young Ladies', but these were perhaps self-indulgent and don't tend to find their way into the major bookstores even now.
And this may be only tangentially related, but Lancet, which reviewed Return to Night when it was first published, obviously still keeps up with developments in medical romance:
...I studied 20 randomly selected medical romance novels... All central male protagonists were doctors... 11 central female protagonists were doctors... The nine other female protagonists consisted of eight nurses and one paramedic. The most common pairing was male doctor with female doctor (11), followed by male doctor with female nurse (eight).
Thus proving that Return to Night, with its highly progressive pairing of female doctor/male random head injury patient, was not only ahead of its time but ahead of ours. (Kidding, mostly, I think.)
And if that wasn't enough, have a bit more meta on the medical romance genre. Apparently the final frontier is female doctor/male nurse: "logically possible but highly unlikely," says the blogger in comments.
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/569685.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
As of yesterday, both Return to Night and Purposes of Love are back in print in the UK, in Virago Modern Classics editions! (For North Face and Kind Are Her Answers you'll have to wait till October... I'm sure you can't contain your excitement.)
In this interesting interview, Mary Renault's agent talks about the process of bringing her back catalogue back into print. Fascinating fact: she left her copyrights to St Hugh's College. Sadly missing information: why Open Road publishing left text out of the US e-books and gave the chapters such awful titles.
If you feel like being mildly infuriated, there's always a column about Mary Renault by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail (written in 2010). Mostly about the historicals:
Miss Renault also wrote a couple of cult books which must mainly appeal to homosexuals, 'The Charioteer' and the wonderfully-titled 'The Friendly Young Ladies', but these were perhaps self-indulgent and don't tend to find their way into the major bookstores even now.
And this may be only tangentially related, but Lancet, which reviewed Return to Night when it was first published, obviously still keeps up with developments in medical romance:
...I studied 20 randomly selected medical romance novels... All central male protagonists were doctors... 11 central female protagonists were doctors... The nine other female protagonists consisted of eight nurses and one paramedic. The most common pairing was male doctor with female doctor (11), followed by male doctor with female nurse (eight).
Thus proving that Return to Night, with its highly progressive pairing of female doctor/male random head injury patient, was not only ahead of its time but ahead of ours. (Kidding, mostly, I think.)
And if that wasn't enough, have a bit more meta on the medical romance genre. Apparently the final frontier is female doctor/male nurse: "logically possible but highly unlikely," says the blogger in comments.
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/569685.html. Please comment there using OpenID.