A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Yourcenar, Marguerite (1903-1987), real name, Marguerite de Crayencour. French poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, short story writer and translator. Combining vast erudition with clarity and a classical sense of form, her novelistic reconstructions of historical eras and people have reached a wide audience. Yourcenar gained international fame with her historical novels, which dealt with modern issues such as homosexuality and deviance, and in which she drew psychologically penetrating and fully credible portraits of people from the distant past. Yourcenar was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a French father and Belgian mother. She started to write as a teenager, when she lived aristocratic and cosmopolitan life travelling with her father. After her father's death she became independently wealthy. She had little formal education. At the outbreak of World War II, in 1939, Yourcenar moved to the United States. She then worked as professor of French literature at Sarah-Lawrence-College in New York and shared her time between France and the USA, where she lived with her partner, Grace Frick. She became an American citizen in 1947, but she wrote only in French. Her first volume of poems, Le Jardin des chimères (1921), showed her sophistication as a writer by reinterpreting ancient Greek myths to make them relevant to the modern world. In 1922 she published another collection of poems, Les Dieux ne sont pas morts. Her first novel, Alexis (1929), was written from the point of a view of an artist trying to remain dedicated to his work, but faced with opposition from his family. Her visit to Italy prompted her to write A Coin in Nine Hands (1934), a novel about the difference between dream and reality. She produced a French translation of The Waves by Virginia Woolf in 1937, and published a French translation of What Maisie Knew by Henry James in 1947. Her most famous novel, bringing her French and American critical acclaim, was Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). This was a fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor, written as a series of letters to his nephew. The emperor is portrayed on the eve of his death, absorbed in his reflections. Handrian, who built the famous wall, was one of the last great Roman imperial leaders, a man of actions and passions. Yourcenar worked on the novel for fifteen years and published it immediately after settling in the United States. Another historical novel, The Abyss (1968), presented the life of an imaginary physician, Zeno of Bruges, andd reflected Yourcenar's fascination with the occult. She worked on the story intermittently from 1921 to 1965. Zeno's personality and life is a combination of DaVinci, 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. This won her the Prix Femina in 1968. In 1971, Théâtre, two volumes of her plays, was published. She also wrote biographies of her early family life, Mishima: A Vision of the Void (1980) , and gave a series of interviews about her life and work published as With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey (1980). The central figures of Yourcenar's fiction are men torn between society's demands and their passions, focusing on key moments of history. In Alexis, which appeared 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. Yourcenar's literary style changed with each work as she sought to challenge her abilities as a writer. However, her work is characterized by knowledge of ancient civilizations and historical periods, and an attempt to understand human motivations. In 1980 Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. In 1986 she was given the French award, Commander of the Legion of Honour, and the American Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. Yourcenar died in Northeast Harbor, Maine on December 17, 1987. |
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