Birthday: Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour, writing as Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)

Novelist, essayist, poet

Fellow of the French Academy, 1980

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1987

Recipient, The Erasmus Prize, 1987

Born in Belgium, Yourcenar published her first novel in 1929, and a translation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, in 1937. That year she began a relationship with the American literary scholar, Grace Frick, that lasted until Yourcenar’s death in 1987.

A prolific writer, Yourcenar established herself early on as a master of the French language, and published her work in France throughout her fifty year residency in the United States. She moved there ahead of World War II at Frick’s invitation; the couple lived in New York and Connecticut before settling on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

In 1951 Yourcenar published a best-selling novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, which imagined the Roman emperor looking back on his life. She was the first woman elected to the French Academy; that venerable body adapted by changing the restroom door signs to “Messieurs/Marguerite Yourcenar.”

In the Academy, Yourcenar- a Belgian who lived in America- was a sort of reverse image of another of the “immortals”, Julien Green, an American who lived in France.