SOURCE: "First Person Third," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4531, February 2-8, 1990, p. 108.

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 Yourcenar for the pretentious tone of the former—which he finds lacking in autobiographical detail—and for the uneven quality of the essays collected in the latter.

When Marguerite Yourcenar died on December 17, 1987, she had almost finished Quoi? L'Eternité, the final volume of her autobiographical trilogy. The book had been impatiently awaited, for in the first two volumes the autobiographer, as a "character", especially as an adult character, is remarkably absent. Souvenirs pieux (1974) deals mainly with the maternal side of the author's family, and Archives du Nord (1977) concerns itself with paternal ancestors and the life of her father, Michel de Crayencour. Yourcenar had revealed that in the third volume she...