Marguerite Yourcenar; Inventing a Life Book

Marguerite Yourcenar is one of my favorite authors and has been so ever since I first read Memoirs of Hadrian. I went on to read several of her other novels and literary essays. Included with Memoirs of Hadrian in my list of favorites are both Alexis and Fires, short, beautiful and uncommon novels. Her prose always demonstrated exquisite precision, often with a poetic quality, and her interest in the classical world was of particular interest. She became the first and only woman to be admitted to the Académie Fançaise in 1980.
Josyane Savigneau's biography is a worthy companion to these works. The subtitle, "Inventing a Life", is appropriate on many levels beginning with her reincarnation as Marguerite Yourcenar in her teens (a nome de plume created as an acronym of her given name of Crayencour) to her years in France followed by decades spent in America. She lived in Maine for 42 years with her lover, the American academian Grace Frick, whom she met in 1937, and with whom she was to live until Frick's death from breast cancer in 1979. That this relationship was bookended by relationships with young men is just one of the many contradictions present in the long life of Marguerite Yourcenar. She was living in the US in June 1940, when the Germans invaded France, and there she was to remain for most of her life. All of this and more is shared in this biography that details the life of learning and love that produced some of the most beautiful prose works of the twentieth century.