Discover the Best Books Written by Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour (June 8, 1903 – December 17, 1987) was a French short story writer, novelist, and essayist known as Marguerite Yourcenar. Best known for her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, she was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. From the beginning of World War II, she lived in the United States with her partner, the American professor Grace Frick. She took American citizenship and died in Maine at the age of eighty-four.

Marguerite was the child of a Belgian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchionne, and a French father, Michel-René Cleenewerck de Crayencour. The family lived in Brussels, Belgium, where Marguerite was born at home. Ten days after her birth (which Marguerite later described with characteristic unsentimentality: “the pretty room looked like the scene of a crime”), her mother died from puerperal fever.

Not long afterward, her father took her to his family estate near Lille, France, where she lived until the age of nine. She remembered these as largely happy years, with nature on the doorstep, a pet lamb and goat that she adored, and a devoted nursemaid called Barbe. According to Marguerite’s first biographer Josyane Savigneau, she later scandalized French readers by claiming that she never regretted not having a mother.

Barbe, together with her loving but largely absent father, was a good enough substitute — at least until Barbe was sacked for taking Marguerite with her to ‘houses of assignation,’ where she went to supplement her income. It was a shock for the young Marguerite, who was not even allowed to say goodbye. After this, her father sold the family château and moved the two of them to Paris.