James Baldwin. E.M. Forster. John Rechy. Andrew Holleran. Those are some of the names that come to mind when the topic is writers of classic gay fiction. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of another classic gay novel — The Last of the Wine — however this tale of same-sex love in ancient Greece wasn't written by a gay man, but by a woman.

That woman is Mary Challans, a British lesbian who wrote under the pseudonym of Mary Renault to avoid embarrassment to her conservative family about her lifestyle and her novels. Renault went on to write one of the most famous gay trilogies in history: Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and The Funeral Games. The three books tell of the rise and fall of Alexander the Great.

In 1953, Renault, who at the time was living with her lover in South Africa, published what has been called one of the dozen best novels written about England enduring World War II. The Charioteer is also one of the best novels written about the lives and romances of gay men in the mid-20th century, an era when being gay was not simply “immoral,” it was flatly illegal.

Just three years later, Renault published The Last of the Wine, a truly trailblazing novel of ancient Greece whose heroes are two men who love each other deeply, openly and honorably.

Charioteer got great critical reviews, decent early sales and has never been out of print for long. Wine got very good critical reviews, very good early sales and eventually a wide audience spread over several generations. It changed the course of Renault's writing career and moved her from the category of respected, minor-league novelist to major-league, international author whose books have become required reading in college courses.

Renault studied English and graduated from Oxford in 1928. After five years of odd jobs, she started nursing school where, early on, she met Julie Mullard, the woman she'd love and live with until her own death 50 years later. In 1939, Renault's first novel, Purposes of Love, was published, followed a year later by Kind Are Her Answers. While both books are described by critics and reviewers as reflecting “sexual ambivalence,” both also got very positive reviews. Both books were written during the early years of World War II, while Renault worked as a nurse in Bristol treating the battered and bloody soldiers who survived the disaster at Dunkirk.

Her next book, The Friendly Young Ladies, has enjoyed a much longer shelf life than her earlier works, which are now out of print; Friendly Young Ladies was reissued in a 60th anniversary edition in 2004. Set in 1937, it's a brittle comedy in which Elsie, a country girl, goes in search of her older sister, Leonora, who left home years before. Elsie finds her sister, now calling herself Leo, writing pulp westerns under the name Tex O'Hara and living on a houseboat with a bright, pretty nurse named Helen.

Renault's next novel, Return to Night, is no longer in print, but it won her the MGM Prize of 1947 — the equivalent of having one's book turned into a movie today. The prize of $150,000 (worth about $1.3 million today), gave Renault and Mullard the financial security to move to South Africa , where there was a fairly large gay and lesbian community living comfortably and without the social elitism and legal repression of England.

Night was followed in 1949 by North Face, the last of Renault's novels with vague autobiographical overtones and sexual “ambiguity.”

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