Marguerite Yourcenar Biography and List of Works

French novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Yourcenar gained international fame with her historical novels, which deal 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.

"- Voyez, continua Zénon. Par-delà ce village, d'autres villages, par delà cette abbaye, d'autres abbayes, par-delà cette fortresse, d'autres fortresses. Et dans chacun des châteaux d'idées, des masures d'opinions superposés aux masures de bois et aux châteaux de pierre, la vie emmure les fous et ouvre un pertuis aux sages."
(from L'Œuvre au Noir, 1968)

Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels, Belgium, into a Franco-Belgian family. She first began to write as a teenager, when she lived an aristocratic and cosmopolitan life travelling with her father. After her father's death she became independently wealthy. In the story 'How Wang-Fo Was Saved' from Oriental Tales (1938), a collection of short stories from several countries, Yourcenar studies the artist's role in the world. Algernon Blackwood had also used the same Chinese legend in 'The Man Who Was Milligan', as had 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 upon his creations to help him - they break into the poet's cell and set him free. The protagonist in Yourcenar's tale is an old painter, who loves the image of things and not the things themselves. An Emperor, who sees his autocracy threatened by the power and beauty of art, imprisons the painter.

"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 Colours. 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 of everything I own, and the desire for everything I shall never possess."
(from 'How Wang-Fo Was Saved')

At the outbreak of World War II, 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. In 1980 Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the Academie Française. Yourcenar died in Northeast Harbour, Maine on December 17, 1987.

Among Yourcenar's best-known books is Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). 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 action and passion. He is inscribing his memories in a letter to his chosen successor. "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 to find them matter for pride. Yet they pass their days in vain license, 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." Part of the story deals with his relationship with a Greek youth called Antinous. Yourcenar worked on the novel for fifteen years and published it immediately after settling in the United States. Coup de Grâce (1957) is the story of a Prussian officer who murders the woman who loves him because he loves her brother. The Abyss (1976) is a fictitious life of Zeno, a Renaissance man and the novel reflects 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. "The strange magma which preachers define by the not ill-chose name of lust (since it would seem to be a matter of the luxuriance of the flesh expending its force) defies examination because of the variety of substance which compose it, and which in their turn break down into other components, themselves complex. Love is one part of the mixture, though less often, perhaps than is admitted, but the concept of love is itself far from simple."

Yourcenar's only novel with a contemporary setting is DENIER DU RÊVE (1934), which centres an assassination attempt on Mussolini. The book was written while she lived in Italy, and revised in 1958-59. Through the central characters - a doctor, a flower-seller, a whore, and a Resistance fighter - Yourcenar examines life under a cruel regime and offers different views into the female psyche. One female character loves unhappiness; another is "stingy like all who have just enough money for a single expense and enough for a single passion."

The central figures in Yourcenar's fiction are men torn between society's demands and their passions. In ALEXIS, which appeared in 1929 and again in 1965 with Yourcenar's foreword, a young aristocratic man writes a long letter to his wife, Monique. Alexis confesses that he did not love his wife and at school he found women disgusting. He has decided to leave her and his son, and devote himself to his music and sensual pleasures that are not in conflict with his own true nature. The author is purposefully ambiguous about Alexis's sexual orientation. In her foreword Yourcenar denies that Gide's Traité du Vain Désir had influenced her book.

Yourcenar's family memoirs SOUVENIRS PIEUX (1974) and ARCHIVES DU NORD (1977) prove the author's skill in depicting contemporary life with the same intensity and insight as she employs in recreating her favourite historical periods. Yourcenar's other works include the prose poems FEUX (1935), and FLEUVE PROFOUND, SOMBRE RIVIÉRE (1974), essays ('Without Liability to Debts,' 1962; 'Mishima or the Vision of Emptiness,' 1981), and several plays. Yourcenar also translated Negro spirituals and various English and American novels into 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 Younrcenar: Inventing a Life by Josyane Savigneau (1993); Mythic Symbolism and Cultural Anthropology in Three Early Works of Marguerite Yourcenar by Patricia E. Frederick (1995); A Case of Betrayal? by Ingeborg Majer O'Sicley (1999)

Books by Marguerite Yourcenar