Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) is one of the great figures of twentieth-century French literature. A novelist, essayist, poet and translator, she is best known as the author of Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au noir. In 1980, she became the first woman elected to the Académie française.

Born in Brussels under the name Marguerite de Crayencour, she grew up between France and numerous travels across Europe. Steeped from an early age in classical literature, history and ancient languages, she published her first texts in the 1920s. Her pen name, Yourcenar, was formed as an anagram of Crayencour - a name she kept when she obtained American citizenship.

Her work is distinguished by a profound attention to history, to ancient civilisations and to the great questions of human existence: power, freedom, knowledge, desire, death and the passage of time.

Published in 1951, Mémoires d’Hadrien remains her most famous book. Written in the form of a letter from the Roman emperor Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, Yourcenar combines historical erudition with philosophical meditation. In 1968 appeared L’Œuvre au noir, a novel devoted to Zeno, a physician and thinker of the Renaissance, which won the Prix Femina.

Marguerite Yourcenar is also the author of Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat, Nouvelles orientales, Feux and the autobiographical cycle Le Labyrinthe du monde.

Settled permanently in the United States from the Second World War onward, she lived mainly in Maine, on Mount Desert Island, where she died in 1987. Through the precision of her style, the breadth of her culture and her capacity to render the past intensely present, Marguerite Yourcenar occupies a singular place in modern French literature.