Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar (born June 8, 1903, Brussels, Belgium—died December 17, 1987, Northeast Harbor, Mount Desert Island, Maine, U.S.) was a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer who became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (French Academy), an exclusive literary institution with a membership limited to 40.

Crayencour was educated at home in French Flanders and spent much of her early life traveling with her father. She began writing as a teenager and continued to do so after her father’s death left her independently wealthy. She led a nomadic life until the outbreak of World War II, at which time she settled permanently in the United States. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1947. The name “Yourcenar” is an imperfect anagram of her original name, “Crayencour.”

Yourcenar’s literary works are notable for their rigorously classical style, their erudition, and their psychological subtlety. In her most important books she re-creates past eras and personages, meditating thereby on human destiny, morality, and power. Her masterpiece is Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian), a historical novel constituting the fictionalized memoirs of that 2nd-century Roman emperor. Another historical novel is L’Oeuvre au noir (1968; The Abyss), an imaginary biography of a 16th-century alchemist and scholar. Among Yourcenar’s other works are the short stories collected in Nouvelles orientales (1938; Oriental Tales), the prose poem Feux (1936; Fires), and the short novel Le Coup de grâce (1939; Eng. trans. Coup de Grâce). Her works were translated by the American Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s secretary and life companion. Yourcenar wrote numerous essays and also translated African American spirituals and various English and American novels into French.

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Membership in the Académie Française requires French citizenship. Yourcenar had become a U.S. citizen, however, so the president of France granted her a special dual U.S.–French citizenship in 1979, and she was subsequently elected to the Académie in 1980.