Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a Belgian-born Frenchnovelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.
The surname Yourcenar was a pen name she later took as a legal surname.
Yourcenar's first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. She translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937.
In 1939 Yourcenar's intimate companion at the time, the literary scholar and Kansas City native Grace Frick, invited the writer to the United States to escape the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Yourcenar lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College. Yourcenar was bisexual; she and Frick became lovers in 1937 and remained together until Frick's death in 1979. After ten years spent in Hartford, Connecticut, they bought a house in Northeast Harbor, Maine on Mount Desert Island, where they lived for decades.
In 1951, she published, in France, the novel Memoirs of Hadrian, which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim. In this novel, Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, the son and heir of Antoninus Pius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. The novel has become a modern classic.
Oriental Tales (French: Nouvelles orientales) is a 1938 short story collection. The stories share a self-consciously mythological form; some are based on pre-existing myths and legends, while some are new. The story "How Wang-Fo Was Saved" was adapted into an animated short film by René Laloux in the 1980s.
