Marguerite Yourcenar
From Philosopedia
Yourcenar, Marguérite [Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour] (8 June 1903 - 17 December 1987)
Yourcenar (an anagram of her birth name) was the first female “immortal” admitted to the French Academy (1981) since its founding in 1635.
The Belgian-born writer also was elected (1969) to the Royal Belgian Academy and in 1982 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A philosophical writer, she was a moralist who not only wrote novels but also stories and essays. Edmund White added, "and rather bad plays and poems" [[1]].
In 1939 when she came to the United States to be with Grace Frick, an American college professor who remained her lifelong collaborator and translator until her death in 1979, Yourcenar ended up exiled by the outbreak of World War II. The two moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Frick found a job, then moved permanently into a house they nicknamed “Petit Plaisance” at Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine.
Her Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) recounts Hadrian’s life in the first person. She also wrote Oriental Stories (1938), Coup de Grace (1939), Alexis (1968), and a work about Ms. Frick, Two Lives and a Dream (1982) - Frick died in 1979, some saying their was an abusive marriage of convenience in which did the housekeeping and Yourcenar spent her time reading and writing.
“Her frequent use of transgressive eroticism, expressed through ‘in extremis’ characters and situations, underscores certain similarities to Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Violette Leduc,” Wisconsin journalist Jacob Stockinger has observed, adding that she “dwelled in history, to be sure, but she also resided in her own age.”
Yourcenar, who was not attracted to organized religion, was not a member of a church, and had a simple funeral. She wrote in French and adapted classical humanism to contemporary concerns, gaining a wide readership.
