French novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, world traveller, and translator Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)was the first woman elected to the French Academy.

Marguerite Yourcenar was born on June 8, 1903, and baptized Marguerite Antoinette Ghislaine. Her father, Michel de Crayencour, was a native of Lille and a restless traveller, and it was by chance that she was born during her family's brief sojourn in Brussels. Her mother, Frenande de Cartier de Marchienne, a Belgian, died ten days after the birth of her daughter of puerperal fever. As a young girl Marguerite lived frequently with an aunt in Belgium and with family friends in northern France until 1912 when she and her father settled in Paris. She was educated by a professional teacher, but she was in large measure self-educated by visits to museums, the classical theaters, and extensive reading.

Her first trip beyond the continent was to England in 1914 where she spent a year learning English and visiting famous museums and historical sites. The remaining years of World War I she passed in Paris with her father, who began her instruction in ancient Greek, or in Provence where her father after suffering serious financial losses, attempted to recover his fortune by gambling at Monte Carlo and elsewhere. She continued her education with various private tutors and received a Baccalaureate degree in 1919. At this point her formal education ended.

Between the ages of 19 and 23 she began writing and, with a subsidy from her father, published two books of poems: Le Jardin des Chime‧res (1921) and Les Dieux ne sont pas morts (1922). Equally with the aid of her father she worked out the anagram that became Yourcenar, her pen-name, which became her legal name in 1947. She composed several hundred pages of manuscript during her early years, threw most of them away, yet preserved fragments that she would turn into complete books 30 or more years later. The lucubrations of her youth were seedbeds for her fertile, restless imagination. So were certain events: a visit to the Villa Adriana was the inspiration for her most famous novel, Mémoires d'Hadrien, which was not completed until 1951.

The 1920s were years of continuous travel. In Italy she witnessed Mussolini's march on Rome. Her knowledge of fascism derived from her acquaintance with Italian life and conversations with Italian intellectuals exiled in Switzerland and southern France. From these experiences she published her novel Denier du rêve (1934), revised in 1959. For Yourcenar, a republication became the occasion for rewriting her text, so a new edition was frequently a new book. She travelled extensively in Switzerland, Germany, and Eastern Europe where political transformations were having a degrading effect on the classical culture that had formed the basis of her education. She published several articles in prominent reviews deploring the decline of European culture; she also published several short stories, mostly in the classical style. However, her reading now included contemporary authors as well as the theories of socialism and anarchy, with the result that her outlook assumed a leftward orientation. She even published a story, thanks to Henri Barbusse, in L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's newspaper.

Politics, however, rarely made up the substance of her compositions. In these years she wrote a story - Alexis ou le traité du vain combat (1929) - about a young musician, married and father of a child, who renounced his family in order to follow his bent toward homosexuality. In the 1920s this was a delicate subject, also taken up by André Gide. Its use in fiction was still unusual and provoked perhaps more outrage than her novel Denier du rêve about a failed plot to assassinate Mussolini. Il Duce had many backers in France.

Yourcenar was remarkably prolific, finding time to think, read, and write while travelling extensively in Greece where she wrote the manuscript of Feux, a series of aphorisms and personal impressions on the subject of passion - above all, carnal passion. A visit to London in 1937 led her to Virginia Woolf, whose novel The Waves she translated into French. Two years later she translated What Maisie Knew by Henry James. Back in Paris she made the acquaintance of an American, Grace Frick, who became a life-time friend and the translator of her major novels. In September 1938 she left for the United States, settled in New Haven where Grace lived, and came to love New England. She also travelled extensively in the upper South, became aware of the condition of the African American population, and began collecting and translating African American spirituals in an anthology which she later published under the appropriate title Fleuve profond, sombre rivie‧re (1964).

In 1938 she settled in a villa on the Isle of Capri where she composed Le Coup de Grâce (1939), a novel based on an event that occurred during the civil war in Russia between the Reds and the Whites. She continued her travels in Europe, returning to the United States when war broke out. She established a residence there for 11 years, meanwhile travelling to Chicago and the Mid-West to lecture and accepting a part-time teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College from 1942 to 1949.

She undertook extensive reading in the libraries of Yale University and other research centers to expand her knowledge of classical antiquity and finally completed the original manuscript of Hadrian's Memoires, first sketched in 1937-1938 and published in 1951. Her second historical novel, L'Oeuvre au noir (1968), came to dominate the historical novel school in France. About her family's origins she published Souvenirs pieux (1974) and Archives du Nord (1977). Her writings represent a form of modern classicism. Her language shows a "favorable inclination toward the soft, fluid French of the century of Versailles that gives to the least word the retarded grace of a dead language."

Yourcenar was the recipient of many awards, including the Prix Femina-Vacaresco (1952) for Mémoires d'Hadrien, for which she was also honored by the French Academy; the page one award of the Newspaper Guild of New York in 1955 for Frick's translation of Hadrian's Memoires; the Prix Combat for Sous bénéfice d'inventaire in 1962; the Prix Femina for Oeuvre au noir in 1968; Legion of Honor and officer of the Order of Leopold of Belgium in 1971; the Grand prix national de la Culture in 1974; and the Grand prix de l'Académie Française and the Grande Médaille de Vermeil of the City of Paris in 1977. She received honorary doctorates from Smith College, Colby College, and Harvard University and was a member of the Belgian Academie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Française (1979), the Académie Française (1980), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982).

Yourcenar died December 17, 1987, at Mount Desert Island Hospital of complications following a stroke. French premier Jacques Chirac said, "French letters has just lost an exceptional woman."

Further Reading

The best English language introduction to the writings of Yourcenar is Frederic Farrell, Marguerite Yourcenar: Criticism and Interpretations (1983). The following sources are all in French: M. Yourcenar, Oeuvres romanesques (Gallimard, 1982), which provides a chronology of events in her life; J. Blot, Marguerite Yourcenar (Seghers, 1971), a useful biographical portrait; R. de Rosbo, Entretiens radiophoniques avec Marguerite Yourcenar (Mercure de France, 1972), an extensive interview; and B. Vercier and J. Lecarme, editors, La Littérature Française depuis 1968 (Bordas, 1982), which is the best study of her writings and her place in French classical literature.

Additional Sources

Savigneau, Josyane, Marguerite Yourcenar: inventing a life, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Yourcenar, Marguerite, Dear departed, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

For more information on Marguerite Yourcenar, visit Britannica.com.

Yourcenar, Marguerite (pseud. of Marguerite de Crayencour) (1903-87). Elected the first woman member of the Académie Française, she spoke in her official reception address of the women who should have taken their places there before her; her work, however, bears little overt trace of feminist concerns. Yourcenar is a poet (Les Dieux ne sont pas morts, 1922), a dramatist (Électre ou la Chute des masques, 1954; Le Mystère d'Alceste, 1963), a short-story writer (La Mort conduit l'attelage, 1934; Comme l'eau qui coule, 1982), an essayist (Sous bénéfice d'inventaire, 1962), a literary critic (studies of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Mishima, and others), and an autobiographer (Le Labyrinthe du monde: I. Souvenirs pieux, 1974; II. Archives du Nord, 1977; III. Quoi? L'Éternité, 1988). Her reputation rests principally, however, on her historical novels, set in ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance period, and the early 20th c.

She was born in Belgium, the child of a wealthy couple. Her mother died shortly after the birth; she was brought up by her father and travelled the world with him at an early age. She began writing in the 1920s, producing most notably Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat (1929) and Le Coup de grâce (1939). Alexis takes the form of a long letter from the protagonist to his wife, confessing his problems in coming to terms with his homosexuality and raising more generally the difficulties of expressing in language deep desires and fears. Le Coup de grâce, set in the Baltic in 1919, also deals with a man of homosexual tendencies who eventually, in the circumstances of civil war, is obliged to execute a woman who loves him, but whom he is unable to love. Yourcenar's interest in male homosexuality marked her life as well as her work: in the 1930s she suffered a painful rejection by a homosexual friend, and in the last years of her life she was close to a young homosexual who died of AIDS. Most of her relationships, however, were with women.

The advent of World War II disrupted her writing; she went to the United States in 1939, largely as a result of her relationship with the American Grace Frick; after a period spent teaching she eventually began writing again in the late 1940s, took American citizenship (1947), and settled on the island of Mount Desert off the American east coast with Frick. She gained an international reputation with the publication of Mémoires d'Hadrien, in 1951. Based on meticulous research, the text is again a first-person narrative and builds up a historical and psychological portrait of Hadrian which includes the emperor's meditations on literature, philosophy, the running of the Roman Empire, and his love for a young Greek boy. In 1968 she was awarded the Prix Fémina for L'Œuvre au noir, a novel set in the Renaissance but whose hero, in his consistent challenging of the institutions and ideologies of his era, could be considered as a forerunner of the 1968 protestors. In Paris at the time of May 1968, the unconventional Yourcenar and Frick, with their idiosyncratic dress, their vegetarianism, and their pacifist and ecological concerns, seemed curiously in tune with the times, despite their age.

In 1971 Yourcenar was elected to the Royal Belgian Academy, and the first of a number of French television crews made its way to Mount Desert. The increasingly serious illness of Frick kept Yourcenar at home throughout much of the 1970s; she completed two volumes of her autobiography which, rather than presenting her own life, investigate the history of her family. In 1979 she published La Couronne et la lyre, a thick volume of her translations (sometimes so free as to be adaptations) of ancient Greek poems; the same year Pivot interviewed her at home for a special number of Apostrophes. In December the death of Frick deprived Yourcenar of a devoted friendship which had lasted for 40 years. In 1980 she was elected to the Académie Française, and in 1982 her works were collected and published in the Pléiade, a rare honour for a living writer. In her last years she travelled a good deal, wrote an essay on Mishima, and was writing the last volume of her autobiography, reaching up to her own birth, when she died.

[Elizabeth Fallaize]

Bibliography

• J. Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar (1990)

(märgərēt' yūrsənär') , 1903–87, French writer, b. Belgium as Marguerite de Crayencour. The first woman elected (1980) to the prestigious French Academy, Yourcenar moved to the United States in 1939, became an American citizen in 1947, and spent much of her life on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Combining vast erudition with clarity and a classical sense of form, her novelistic reconstructions of historical eras and people have reached a wide audience. Her many works include Memoirs of Hadrian (1951, tr. 1954), a fictionalized autobiography of the Roman emperor that is probably her finest book; The Abyss (1968, tr. 1976), set in 16th-century Flanders; and Le Labyrinthe du monde (3 vol., 1974–88), a historical memoir of her own family.

Bibliography

See biography by J. Savigneau (1993); studies by P. Horn (1985) and G. Shurr (1987).

Quotes:

"Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself."

"The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)