Marguerite Yourcenar

Born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour on June 8, 1903, in Brussels, Belgium, to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, a wealthy French landowner from Flanders, and Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, of Belgian nobility, who died ten days after giving birth. Raised by her father and paternal grandmother, the young Marguerite was educated privately, never attending school, and was reading Racine and Aristophanes in the original by her early teens. Her father, a restless cosmopolitan, took her across Europe and instilled in her a passion for classical antiquity. She adopted the pen name Yourcenar, a near-anagram of Crayencour, and published her first novel, Alexis, in 1929, at twenty-six. Her first version of Memoirs of Hadrian was attempted in the 1920s but abandoned. In 1937, she met Grace Frick, an American literary scholar from Kansas City, and the two became lovers and lifelong companions. When war broke out in 1939, Frick invited Yourcenar to the United States. They settled eventually in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island, where Yourcenar would live for the rest of her life. She taught comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1951, after decades of intermittent work, she published Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel in the form of a dying Roman emperor's letter to the young Marcus Aurelius, meditating on power, love, and mortality. It was an immediate and enduring masterpiece. The Abyss (1968), set in the Renaissance, won the Prix Femina. In 1980, she became the first woman elected to the Academie francaise in its 345-year history. She died on December 17, 1987, at her home in Maine, at eighty-four, while working on the third volume of a family memoir she would never complete.