Marguerite Yourcenar's 117th Birthday

Today’s Doodle, illustrated by London-based guest artist Marguerite Dumans, celebrates the 117th birthday of French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, widely admired for her masterful use of historical settings to explore modern issues and universal themes. Yourcenar’s literary accomplishments positioned her to become the first woman elected to the prestigious Académie Française (“French Academy”), an organization founded in 1635 dedicated to the preservation of the French language with a membership limited to only 40 linguistic scholars.  

On this day in 1903, Marguerite de Crayencour was born into a wealthy family in Brussels, Belgium. She moved to Paris as a child with her father, who eschewed public education in favor of private tutors, books, and museums. In 1921, she published her first book of poetry, assuming the pen name “Yourcenar,” a close anagram of her surname “Crayencour.” 

Considered one of the first notable openly lesbian writers, Yourcenar received critical acclaim for her first novella, “Alexis” (1929), which centered around a title character who comes out as gay to his wife. During the ’30s, she traveled Europe amid a bohemian artistic scene, but with the outbreak of World War II, she settled in the United States with her long-time partner and translator, Grace Frick. There she completed “Mémoires d’Hadrien” (“Memoirs of Hadrian” 1951), a fictionalized account of the titular Roman emperor that is widely considered her masterpiece. 

Yourcenar was honored with many accolades, including two Prix Femina (“Femina Prizes”), as well as the Grand Prix de Littérature (Grand Prize for Literature) awarded in 1977 by the Académie Française, which she historically joined three years later.

Special thanks to Joan E. Howard, Director of Petite Plaisance, for the story of Marguerite's life:

The French author Marguerite Yourcenar, née Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour, was born on this day in 1903.

The child of an aristocratic family, Marguerite was raised in the historically turbulent, linguistically diverse region of Flanders in northern France. She was cared for in her early years by live-in nannies and never went to school. 

The strongest influence on her intellectual development was her quinquagenarian father, Michel de Crayencour. Under the tutelage of this highly literate nonconformist, young Marguerite learned Latin and Greek and developed a passion for classical culture. Her first literary efforts, collections of poetry published at her father’s expense, evoked the mythical figures of ancient Greece and Rome. These slim volumes bore the gender-ambiguous first name “Marg” and the pseudonym “Yourcenar,” a near-perfect anagram of the patronymic Crayencour.

Like her father, Marguerite Yourcenar loved languages and traveling. She learned English during a fourteen-month stay on the outskirts of London early in World War I and Italian when she visited Italy with an aging Michel in the 1920s. In February 1924, at the Villa Adriana outside Rome, she became fascinated by the second-century emperor Hadrian, who would later be the subject of her most-renowned literary work. 

In February 1937, while staying in Paris, Yourcenar met the American scholar Grace Frick. The two women were immediately drawn to each other and spent several months touring the Mediterranean together. When Frick had to return to her doctoral studies at Yale University that fall, Yourcenar followed her to Connecticut and stayed with her for seven months. In the fall of 1939, with war clouds brewing in Europe, Yourcenar returned to the United States and joined Frick in New York City. Having entered the country on a temporary professional visa, the Frenchwoman ended up becoming an American citizen. When she was naturalized in 1947, Yourcenar became her legal name.  

In the fall of 1950, Yourcenar and Frick bought a home on Mount Desert Island in Maine, calling it Petite Plaisance. They first fell in love with the island’s wild landscape in 1942 and spent summer months vacationing there every year. It was at Petite Plaisance that Yourcenar completed the first great work of her creative maturity, “Memoirs of Hadrian,” on the day after Christmas 1950. The novel was released in France in 1951. Written, as the author once said, “with one foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts,” the book takes the form of a letter from the emperor Hadrian to his eventual successor Marcus Aurelius. To Yourcenar’s astonishment, “Hadrian” became an immediate best-seller and was translated into dozens of languages.

Her next major work, “The Abyss,” came out during the tumultuous “events of May” 1968 in Paris. Its main character, Zeno, is a sixteenth-century alchemist-philosopher-physician who, like the student protesters in France, challenges the dogmas of his society. Although “Memoirs of Hadrian” is often considered to be Yourcenar’s masterpiece, "The Abyss” is the novel that meant the most to the author herself, who often said that she loved Zeno like a brother.

Already in the 1950s, Yourcenar and Frick were growing increasingly concerned about the fate of the earth. They gardened organically long before the practice was in vogue. As Yourcenar once wrote to a friend when Frick’s cancer flared up in the 1960s, “No matter what happens, I will never forget the intimacy I have had with this American earth.” Both women also engaged in several political battles—demonstrating against the Vietnam War, fighting to end animal cruelty, and protesting the desecration of the natural environment, to mention a few. In subtle ways, all these themes found their way into Yourcenar’s literary work. 

Grace Frick died in 1979, finally succumbing to the cancer that she had endured for more than 20 years. In 1980, Marguerite Yourcenar was catapulted to international celebrity by her election to the Académie Française. Her induction into that 40-member body on January 22, 1981 made her the first woman “Immortal” in the 350-year history of France’s most prestigious honorary institute.

What the French critic François Nourissier wrote about the second volume of Yourcenar’s family memoir “How Many Years” could be said about Yourcenar generally: “she relates the births, the vanities, the agonies, the madness of men. This is what a writer is: not someone or other plus some books, but a person whose life and words, whose books and Time seem consubstantial.”

Late in life, Madame Yourcenar pursued her longstanding interest in Eastern cultures and religions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, making long trips to Japan, India, and Thailand.

Marguerite Yourcenar is buried next to Grace Frick in the Somesville cemetery, adjacent to the cottage where the women spent their first summers on Mount Desert Island.

Marguerite Yourcenar in her mid-twenties with her Pekinese Kou-Kou-Haï, about whom she wrote the essay “Suite d’estampes pour Kou-Kou-Haï” in 1927

Marguerite Yourcenar in her studio at Petite Plaisance in 1955

Marguerite Yourcenar in 1968 with her cocker spaniel, Valentine

Marguerite Yourcenar in Thailand, 1983

Credit for all photos above: © Petite Plaisance Trust ­­– All Rights Reserved.

Guest Artist Q&A with Marguerite Dumans

Today’s Doodle was illustrated by London-based guest artist Marguerite Dumans. Below, she shares her thoughts behind the making of this Doodle:

Q: Why was this topic meaningful to you personally?

A: I love reading! And I knew Marguerite was the first woman to enter the French Academy and that she had been published in the prestigious Pléiade while she was alive, which is very impressive. 
 

Q: What were your first thoughts when you were approached about the project?

A: So honoured! I wanted to get a sense of how she grew up, what inspired her, what topics she was interested by and committed to defend. Basically try to understand what brought her to write the way she did.
 

Q: Did you draw inspiration from anything in particular for this Doodle?

A: I got inspired by the brilliant interview Bernard Pivot did of her in the television show.
 

Q: What message do you hope people take away from your Doodle?

A: Get intrigued to read her books!

Early sketches of the Doodle