Marguerite Yourcenar
| Marguerite Yourcenar | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour 8 June 1903 Brussels, Belgium |
| Died | 17 December 1987 (aged 84) Northeast Harbor, Maine, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, poet |
| Nationality | France |
| Notable works | Mémoires d'Hadrien |
| Notable awards | Erasmus Prize (1983) |
| Partner | Grace Frick (1937–1979; Frick's death) |
Marguerite Yourcenar (French pronunciation: [maʁɡəʁit juʁsənaʁ]; 8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.
Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels, Belgium, to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, of French bourgeois descent, and a Belgian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, of Belgian nobility, who died ten days after her birth. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother. The surname Yourcenar was a pen name she later took as a legal surname.
Yourcenar's first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. She translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937.
In 1939, her intimate companion at the time, the literary scholar and Kansas City native Grace Frick, invited Yourcenar to the United States to escape the outbreak of World War II in Europe. She lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College.
Yourcenar was lesbian; she and Frick became lovers in 1937 and remained together until Frick's death in 1979. After ten years spent in Hartford, Connecticut, they bought a house in Northeast Harbor, Maine on Mount Desert Island, where they lived for decades.
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