Marguerite Yourcenar (born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour; June 8, 1903 – December 17, 1987) was a novelist and essayist who was born in Belgium but became a French citizen. She later became a citizen of the United States in 1947. She won the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize. In 1980, she became the first woman elected to the Académie Française. In 1965, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Biography
Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels, Belgium. Her full name was Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour. Her parents were Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour and Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne. Her father was from a wealthy middle-class family in French Flanders and owned land. Her mother, who was from a noble Belgian family, died ten days after Marguerite was born. Marguerite lived with her father’s mother and later used the name Yourcenar as her writing name. In 1947, she officially changed her legal name to Yourcenar.
Yourcenar’s first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. In 1937, she translated Virginia Woolf’s The Waves over ten months. In 1939, her partner at the time, Grace Frick, a literary scholar from Kansas City, invited Yourcenar to the United States to escape World War II. Yourcenar taught comparative literature in New York City and at Sarah Lawrence College.
Yourcenar and Frick became romantic partners in 1937 and remained together until Frick’s death in 1979. After living in Hartford, Connecticut, for ten years, they bought a home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island. They lived there for many years and are buried next to each other at Brookside Cemetery in Somesville, Maine. Yourcenar’s final companion was Jerry Wilson, with whom she had a difficult relationship. Wilson died of AIDS in 1986.
In 1951, Yourcenar published Memoirs of Hadrian in France. She had worked on the novel for about ten years, writing it in parts. The book was a great success and received praise from critics. In the novel, Yourcenar imagined the life and death of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, the son of Antoninus Pius, his successor. Hadrian reflects on his life, including his achievements, mistakes, his love for Antinous, and his beliefs. The book is now considered a modern classic. Grace Frick translated the English version of the novel.
In 1980, Yourcenar became the first woman elected to the Académie française, a French literary institution. A story says that the bathroom labels in the male-dominated group were changed to read “Messieurs|Marguerite Yourcenar” (Gents/Marguerite Yourcenar). Yourcenar wrote many novels, essays, and poems, as well as a set of three memoirs. At the time of her death, she was working on the third book in the trilogy, titled Quoi? L’Éternité.
Yourcenar’s home on Mount Desert Island, called Petite Plaisance, is now a museum honoring her life. She is buried across the water in Somesville, Maine.