Mary Renault, H.D., and Mythic Retellings: The Cultural Politics of Twentieth Century Hellenism

As prompted by letters of the 1960s from Mary Renault to Bryher, addressing their shared métier of historical fiction, this essay recognizes affinities, as yet largely unacknowledged, between the mid-century fiction of Mary Renault, often informed by her engagement with Ancient Greece, and the earlier Hellenism of modernist writer H.D., as well as the vein of modernist Hellenism H.D.’s work exemplifies. Like Renault, H.D. and other modernist writers often enlist Hellenism as historical fiction that conjures past worlds—to comment on, and provide alternative vocabulary for issues of, the present. Comparison of Renault’s and H.D.’s shared gravitation toward myths associated with the figure of Theseus—which they both engage in a spirit of revision—further illuminates the way that, like Renault’s turn to Ancient Greece, much early modernist work was animated by efforts to rethink gender and sexuality. Yet comparing Renault’s and H.D.’s retellings of myths connected with Theseus also uncovers the major areas of difference between them, revealing the patriarchal allegiances and misogynistic costs of Renault’s modes of reworking, at a marked distance from H.D.’s forms of feminist re-vision.