Grace Frick

Grace Frick translated Marguerite Yourcenar into English, shared her life for forty years, and has been argued about ever since by people deciding whether that was a career or a sacrifice. She was from Kansas City, took a degree at Wellesley and did graduate work at Yale on Coleridge, and was a teacher and academic administrator when she met Yourcenar in Paris in 1937. She brought her to the United States in 1939, ahead of the war, and the two of them settled from 1950 on Mount Desert Island in Maine, in a house called Petite Plaisance without a car and for years without a telephone. Frick translated Memoirs of Hadrian, The Abyss and Coup de Grace, and the translations are close, formal and very carefully made; Yourcenar checked them and the two argued over words for months at a time. She also handled the contracts, the correspondence, the driving and the household, and did research for the novels in American libraries. Her own scholarly work stopped. She had breast cancer from 1958 and lived with it for twenty-one years, through repeated recurrences, while Yourcenar - who found illness difficult - travelled. Biographers since have divided over whether Frick chose that life or was absorbed into it. She died in 1979 and is buried on the island. Petite Plaisance is now a museum kept as the two of them left it. Yourcenar was elected to the Academie francaise the year after Frick died. Their correspondence and Frick s diaries were embargoed for decades and have only recently been opened.

• Lived: 1903 CE – 1979 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: writer