Marguerite Yourcenar – Google doodle on French novelist, essayist on her 117th birthday

Google today celebrates the 117^th birthday of Marguerite Yourcenar, the world-famous French novelist and essayist, who later became a US citizen in 1947. Google dedicates a beautiful doodle on her birthday on June 8.

Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels in Belgium on June 8, 1903. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner. She lost her mother on the tenth day of her birth. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother. She adopted the surname Yourcenar – an almost anagram of Crayencour, having one fewer c – as a pen name; in 1947 she also took it as her legal surname.

Marguerite Yourcenar’s first novel titled ‘Alexis’ was published in 1929. She translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937. She is widely admired for her masterful use of historical settings to explore modern issues and universal themes. Her 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.

Marguerite Yourcenar received critical acclaim for her first novel ‘Alexis’ that centred around a title character who comes out as gay to his wife. During the ’30s, she travelled 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.

Marguerite Yourcenar was bisexual. She and Frick became lovers in 1937 and remained together until Frick's death in 1979 and a tormented relationship with Jerry Wilson. After ten years spent in Hartford, Connecticut, they bought a house in Northeast Harbour, Maine, on Mount Desert Island, where they lived for decades. They are buried alongside each other at Brookside Cemetery, Mount Desert, Maine.

Marguerite Yourcenar published the novel Memoirs of Hadrian in 1951 in France, which she had been writing on-and-off for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim. In this novel, Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, the son and heir of Antoninus Pius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. The novel has become a modern classic.

In 1980, Yourcenar was the first female member elected to the Académie française. Her house on Mount Desert Island, Petite Plaisance, is now a museum dedicated to her memory. She died on December 17, 1987 at the age of 84. Her body was buried across the sound in Somesville, Maine.

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