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Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) - original name Marguerite de Crayencour |
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French writer, who gained
international fame with her metaphysical historical
novels. In these works Marguerite Yourcenar drew psychologically
penetrating
portraits of people from the distant past. She also dealt with issues
such as homosexuality and deviance. The fictive historical biography, Mémoires d'Hadrien
(1951, Memoirs of Hadrian), in which the second-century Roman emperor
surveys his life from his deathbed, is perhaps her best-known book. "Yes, Zeno admitted. "I was tired of books for fodder. Give me a text that moves; let me see thousands of figures, Roman and Arabic; characters running sometimes from left to right, like those of our scribes, and sometimes from right to left, as in manuscripts from the East; blank spaces which spell plague or war, rubrics traced in blood. And everywhere signs and symbols, with here and there stains even stranger than symbols . . . What better gard than this for journeying unseen? . . . I can roam the world no more remarked than an insect on the pages of a psalter." (The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, p. 9; translation of L'Oeuvre au noir, 1968) Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie
Ghislane in Brussels, Belgia, into a Franco-Belgian family. Yourcenar's
Bergian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, died of puerperal
fever and peritonitis shortly after giving birth. From 1903 to 1912, Yourcenar spent her summer months at the château of Mont-Noir, "a small brick manor house, built with a great many superadded turrets, in that Louis XIII style so cherished during the Romantic era. The date 1824 was engraved on the façade." (Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life by Josyane Savigneau, translated by Joan E. Howard, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 20) She began to write as a teenager, when she lived traveling life with her father, Michel de Crayencour. Much of his time he spent gambling, hoping to win back the fortune he had lost, or with his mistresses. During
World War I Marguerite and her father sought refuge from the suburbs of London.
She had private tutors and she was often "left to herself". With her
father she read aloud Virgil in Latin, Homer in Greek,
and other classics, passing the book back and forth. Her pen-name she
later created from the surname of her father; Yourcenar is a nearly
perfect anagram. Beginning from Le Jardin des Chimères (1921), a poem about Icarus, Michel de Crayencour had her early works published at
his own expense. Michel de Crayencour died in 1929. With the inheritance Yourcenar received, she spent the next ten years in traveling, literary pursuits, and love affairs on the Paris lesbian scene. In the story 'How Wang-Fo Was Saved' from Oriental Tales (1938), a collection of short stories from several countries, Yourcenar studied the artist's role in the world. Coincidentally, Algernon Blackwood used the same Chinese legend in 'The Man Who Was Milligan' and M.R. James in 'The Mezzotint'. In a version told in the classic Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, a famous poet is thrown into prison by an angry king. To escape he calls his creations to help him - they break into the poet's cell and set him free. Yourcenar's protagonist is an old painter, who loves the image of things and not the things themselves. The painter is imprisoned by an Emperor, who sees his autocracy threatened by the power and beauty of art. "The kingdom of Han is not the most beautiful of kingdoms, and I am not the Emperor. The only empire which is worth reigning over is which you alone can enter, old Wang, by the road of One Thousand Curves and Ten Thousand Colors. You alone reign peacefully over mountains covered in snow that cannot melt, and over fields of daffodils that cannot die. And that is why, Wang-Fo, I have imagined a punishment for you, for you whose enchantment has given me the disgust at everything I own, and with desire for everything I shall never possess. And in order to lock you up in the only cell from which there is no escape, I have decided to have your eyes burned out, because your eyes, Wang-Fo, are the two magic gates that open onto your kingdom." ('How Wang-Fo Was Saved,' Oriental Tales, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985, pp. 13-14; originally published in French under the title Nouvelles orientales, 1938) At the outbreak of World War II, Yourcenar moved to the United States. To support herself, she worked as professor of French literature at Sarah-Lawrence-College in New York. One of her students has recalled, that she was not a professor like the others, her "way of teaching was not that of a classical teacher but someone who is crazy about literature. She couldn't have cared less about grammar or exercises." (Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, p. 165) Though quiet and retiring by nature, she had love affairs with both men and women. When she left her private papers to the Houghton Manuscript Library she stipulated that her private journal not be made available for the public until fifty years after her death. Yourcenar shared her time between France and the USA, where she lived with her partner, Grace Frick, who came from Kansas City. Orphaned early on, she had been raised by her uncle. Grace earned her Master's in English literature in 1927; Frick was the translator of several of her works. After 1950 Yourcenar's home was on Mount Desert Island, Maine, but she also made lenghty trips to Europe. In 1980 Yourcenar
became the first woman to be
elected to the Academie Française. Frick died from cancer in 1979.
Yourcenar then entered into a stormy relationship with Jerry Wilson
(1949–1986), a gay photographer, with whom he travelled around the
world. He died of AIDS. Speaking of reincarnation in an interview in 1987, Yourcenar said that
"certainly all the physical evidence points to our total annihilation,
but if one also considers all the metaphysical données, one is tempted to say that it
is not as simple as that." ('The Art of Writing Fiction No. 103: Marguerite Yourcenar,' The Paris Review, Vol. 30, No. 106, Spring 1988) Yourcenar continued traveling but also kept on writing Quoi ? L'éternité (1988), the final volume of her autobiographical trilogy. Its title was taken from Rimbaud: "Elle est retrouvée! / Quoi? l'éternite. / C'est la mer mêlée / Au soleil..." Disappointing many readers, the focus of the memoirs is on her father. She guarded her own privacy and shed little light on the years in the United States. Marguerite Yourcenar died in Northeast Harbor, Maine on December 17, 1987. A lot of speculation has arisen regarding the impact of the absence of her mother on her writing. Yourcenar knew her only from photograps, but nevertheless, during her career, Yourcenar was more actively concerned with historical figures than this side of her personal life. During a television interview with Bernard Pivot in 1979 she said that "it is impossible, unless you have an extremely romantic character, to be enamoured of, or moved by, a person you have never seen". (Marguerite Yourcenar: a quest for Ataraxia; a locus amœnus hindered by absence and presence by Sandra Leslie Warren, thesis, 2013, p. 16; https://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1049197/. Accessed 1 July 2025) Yourcenar worked on Mémoires d'Hadrien for fifteen years. The first version was
written in third person. She nearly abandoned the project, but then, on
a long train journey across the Unites States, she wrote the first fifty pages –
Hadrian is the narrator – and was eventually able to complete the
project. Mémoires has remained in print ever since it published in Paris in early December 1951. In her 'Notebooks on the Writing of Memoirs of Hadrian' Yourcenar tells that she wrote the book with "one foot in scholarship, the other in magic, or more exactly and without metaphor, in that sympathetic magic which consists of projecting oneself mentally into the mind of someone else." ('Yourcenar, Margierite,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 1587) Differing from many historians, Yourcenar gave space to Hadrian's mid-life passion for a Greek youth called Antinous, whose loss colored with sorrow the rest of his reign. The
emperor is portrayed on the eve of his death, absorbed in his
reflections. Hadrian, who built the famous wall, was one of the last
great Roman imperial leaders. He recounts his memories in his testament
letter to his chosen successor, Marcus Aurelius. "There is but one
thing in which I feel superior to most men: I am freer, and at the same
time more compliant, than they dare to be. Nearly all of them fail to
recognise their due liberty, and likewise their true servitude. They
curse their fetters, but seem sometimes to find them matter for pride. Yet they
pass their days in vain licence, and do not know how to fashion for
themselves the lightest yoke. For my part I have sought liberty more
than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom." (Memoirs of Hadrian, translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author, London: Secker & Warburg, 1954, p. 48) Coup de Grâce (1957) told of a Prussian officer, who murders the woman who loves him because he loves her brother. The Abyss
(1976) was a fictitious life of Zeno, a Renaissance man, created from
Yourcenar's fascination with the occult. She worked on the story
intermittently from 1921 to 1965. Unlike Hadrian, Zeno is a fictive person. Zeno's character and life is a
combination of Da Vinci, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno. He
travels around Europe and the Mediterranean searching for truth. In the
rivalry between Catholic and Protestant states, Zeno refuses to take
sides, and like Hadrian, Yourcenar depicts him as essentially
homosexual. "Or
perhaps this inclination was attributable to tastes as simple but as
inexplicable as those which we have for one fruit rather than for
another: it mattered little to him what the reason was. The essential
was that his excesses, like his ambition, had, in sum, been rare and
brief, as if it had been his nature to exhaust rapidly whatever the
pssions could teach or give." (Ibid., p. 179) The central figures in Yourcenar's fiction are torn between society's demands and their own passions. Noteworthy, the majority of the characters she presents are male. Yourcenar's only novel with a contemporary setting was Le Denier du rêve (1934, A Coin in Nine Hands), about an assassination attempt on Mussolini. The book was written while she lived in Italy, and revised in 1958-59. Through her characters – a doctor, a flower-seller, a whore, and a Resistance fighter – Yourcenar examines life under a cruel regime and offerers different views into the female psyche. A woman loves unhappiness, another is "stingy like all who have just enough money for a single expense and enough fire for a single passion." (A Coin in Nine Hands, translated from the French by Dori Katz in collaboration with the author, London: Black Swan, 1984, p. 36) In Alexis, which came out in 1929 and again in
1965 with Yourcenar's foreword, a young aristocratic man writers a long
letter to his wife, Monique. Alexis confesses that he did not love his
wife, and at school he already found women disgusting. He has decided
to leave her and his son, and devote himself to his music and sensual
pleasures, that are not against his own true self. The author is
purposefully ambiguous about their nature and Alexis's sexual
orientation. In her foreword Yourcenar denies that Gide's Traité du Vain Désir had influenced her book. Mishima ou ou La vision du vide (1980, Mishima: A Vision of the Void) tried to separate the personaor shadow of great Japanese writer, and homosexual, and the human being behind all of that. "The changes of misinterpretation are many. Let us go, nevertheless, but let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work." (Mishima: A Vision of the Void, translated by Alberto Manguel in collaboration with the author, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1986, p. 5) The first version of Anna, soror... (1981) Yourcenar
composed already at the age of 22. The central characters are Miguel, a
young aristocrat, and his sister Anna. They live and love earch other
in seclusion from the surrounding world after the death of their
mother. Yourcenar's family memoirs, Souvenirs pieux (1974), in which she coldly calls her parents as "Monsieur de C." and "Fernande," and Archives du Nord (1977), prove the author's skill to depict contemporary life. Her other works include prose poems FEUX (1935), and Fleuve profound, sombre rivière (1974), essays, and several plays. Yourcenar also translated Negro spirituals and various English and American novels into her native French. For further reading: Marguerite Yourcenar by Pierre L. Horn (1985); Marguerite Yourcenar: A Readers Guide by Georgia Shurr (1985); From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar by Joan E. Howard (1992); Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life by Josyane Savigneau (1993); Mythic Symbolism and Cultural Anthropology in Three Early Works of Marguerite Yourcenar by Patricia E. Frederick (1995); Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual by Nigel Saint (2000); The Troubling Play of Gender: the Phaedra Dramas of Tsvetaeva, Yourcenar, and H.D. by Maria Stadter Fox (2001); At the Periphery of the Center: Sexuality and Literary Genre in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar and Julien Green by Thomas J.D. Armbrecht (2007); Marguerite Yourcenar: Authenticity, Modernity and the Political Aesthetic by D. Kapsaskis (2008); Marguerite Yourcenar: a quest for Ataraxia; a locus amœnus hindered by absence and presence by Sandra Leslie Warren (2013); Le minotaure de Yourcenar: histoire d'une pièce by Serena Codena (2021); The Environment and Marguerite Yourcenar: Readings of Le Labyrinthe du monde by Rodney Mearns (2024); Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian: Writing the Life of a Roman Emperor by Keith Bradley (2024) Selected works:
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