French novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, world traveller, and translator Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) was the first woman elected to the French Academy.Marguerite Yourcenar was born on June 8, ...
Read more
Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman elected to the prestigious Académie Française. A self-taught scholar, novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator, widely traveled and we...
Read more
In the following excerpt from a series of interviews conducted over many years and first published in France as Les yeux ouverts: Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey in 1980, Yourcenar discusses a number o...
Read more
In the following review of Dear Departed, Beaver praises Yourcenar's imaginative evocation of her mother's and father's families, describing the book as "a key to the genet...
Read more
In the following review of Dear Departed, Begley provides an introduction to Yourcenar's major themes and worldview.
Marguerite Yourcenar's genius was such that she had at her command...
Read more
Johnston is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on twentieth-century history and literature. In the following essay, which was originally presented at a conference on twentieth...
Read more
Guppy is an Iranian-born writer and critic who has served as the London editor of The Paris Review. In the following interview, which was conducted in April 1987, Yourcenar discusses her life, career,...
Read more
In the following review, Czynski lauds Yourcenar's writing style and discusses Oriental Tales in relation to the development of the short story genre. Czynski also comments on some of the inade...
Read more
Schmidt is an American critic and educator. In the following review of With Open Eyes, A Coin in Nine Hands, and Two Lives and a Dream, she lauds Yourcenar's work.
The date March 6, 1980, wa...
Read more
In the following review of the final volume of Yourcenar's autobiography, Quoi? L'éternité, and the essay collection En pèlerin et étranger, Taylor criticizes...
Read more
Marks is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on French literature, focusing mainly on the works of Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. In the following essay, she analyzes the rela...
Read more
Critical Essay by John L. Brown
Marguerite Yourcenar, in the second volume of Le labyrinthe du monde, a family history begun with Souvenir pieux, reaffirms her position as one of the outstanding writ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Alexander Coleman
[Sous bénéfice d'inventaire, a collection of essays shows] Yourcenar's historical imagination as being quite unrelated to any kind of l...
Read more
Critical Essay by Edwin Kennebeck
[The] situation which Miss Marguerite Yourcenar has attempted to delineate, [in Coup de Grace] …, is a strange triangle formed by Erick, Sophie, who is in lov...
Read more
Critical Essay by Marc Slonim
"L'Oeuvre au Noir" is at the same time a study of the Renaissance and a picture of that turbulent era as seen through the eyes of a poet. Unlike mos...
Read more
Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
A compact scrapbook of sixteenth-century Europe, L'Oeuvre au noir will delight historians of this period. Marguerite Yourcenar's vision e...
Read more
Critical Essay by Arthur A. Cohen
"The Abyss" [the title of the American edition of "L'Oeuvre au noir"] is an elaborate metaphor for the emptiness of history, the v...
Read more
Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
The point [of The Abyss] is to create an image of a fully achieved humanity, of a man mature within the conditions of his time; unapologetic about the passions, undece...
Read more