Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman elected to the Academie francaise, three hundred and forty-five years after it was founded, and she spent most of her life on an island off the coast of Maine. She was born Marguerite de Crayencour in Brussels; her mother died days later, and her father, who was wealthy, eccentric and had no interest in schools, educated her himself in Latin and Greek and took her round Europe. Yourcenar is a near-anagram of the family name that the two of them invented together. Memoirs of Hadrian, published in 1951 after she had carried the idea for twenty-five years and burned an early draft, is a letter from the dying emperor to the young Marcus Aurelius, and it did something historical fiction had not done: it made a Roman mind that is neither modern nor costume, built out of the sources themselves. The Abyss followed in 1968. She lived from 1939 with the American translator Grace Frick on Mount Desert Island, in a house without a car, and the two of them translated each other's worlds for forty years until Frick died of cancer after a decade of illness. The Academie elected her in 1980 against considerable resistance, some of it about her sex and some about her having taken American citizenship. She translated Cavafy, Woolf and negro spirituals into French. Her Academie sword was decorated at her request with the names of her houses rather than heraldry. She travelled widely in her seventies and eighties, including to Kenya, India and Japan. She is buried beside Frick at Somesville on Mount Desert Island.

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