Yourcenar, Marguerite (märgərēt` y

rsənär`), 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).

Yourcenar, Marguerite

orig. Marguerite de Crayencour

Marguerite Yourcenar, 1971.

(credit: Gisèle Freund 1971)

(born June 8, 1903, Brussels, Belg.—died Dec. 17, 1987, Northeast Harbor, Maine, U.S.) Belgian-born French-U.S. novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Independently wealthy after her father's death, she led a nomadic life until World War II, when she settled in the U.S. with the American woman who would be her lifelong companion and translator. Her works are noted for their rigorously classical style, their erudition, and their psychological subtlety. Her masterpiece is Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), a historical novel of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Other works include the novels Coup de grâce (1939) and The Abyss (1968), Oriental Tales (1938), and the prose poem “Fires” (1936). In 1980 she became the first woman in history to be elected to the Académie Française.