Musee marguerite yourcenar biography

Yourcenar died December 17, , at Mount Desert Island Hospital of complications following a stroke. Yourcenar's house on Mount Desert Island, Petite Plaisance , is now a museum dedicated to her memory. As an artist and thinker—for Yourcenar's novels must be regarded as simultaneously art, scholarship, and profound philosophical meditation—Marguerite Yourcenar writes squarely in defense of the very highest standards and traditions of that enlightened humanism which Hadrian promulgated for an empire and to the agonized rebirth of which her Zeno dies a martyr.

In Belgium, Marguerite was awarded the Erasmus Prize, and in Paris her time was fully occupied with social and professional engagements. Vercier and J. Yourcenar frequently used historical or legendary events and figures as the basis for her creative works.

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Sawyer U. Savigneau, Josyane. Yourcenar undertook a lecture tour in the southern United States which enabled her to gather materials for a book on African-American spirituals, Deep River, Dark River Margules, Max. Marguerite Yourcenar suffered a stroke in November , and died in a hospital in Bar Harbor, Maine, in December; she wrote that "one must not die unawares," and she wanted to die "with open eyes" like her Roman emperor Hadrian.

Paris: R. But after delivering a series of lectures in Belgium and spending only ten days in Paris, she and Frick cut short their stay and returned to the States. Her election, Savigneau says, "was probably for Yourcenar the first site of confrontation with men…. Because of her mother's wish to be near her relatives, Yourcenar was born in Brussels, although she was immediately registered as a French citizen.

Marguerite of Navarre. Her life of suitcases, hotels, and wandering about Europe suited her well, and everywhere she went she worked on "Quoi? Retrieved 2 September In May , Yourcenar welcomed Jerry Wilson and Maurice Dumay who came to Maine with a French television crew; in February , Marguerite gave a lengthy and candid interview to Matthieu Galey which resulted in the publication of his book With Open Eyes , that revealed "his fearsome abhorrence of women," Savigneau claims.

Read Edit View history. Her choice of subject reveals her interest in homosexuality, a word she never used because she considered it "too medical. Retrieved 17 June Yourcenar's literary hiatus came to an end in January , when she received a trunk that she had left at the Hotel Maurice in Lausanne, Switzerland, in ; it contained fragments of a work on the emperor Hadrian that she had begun in More important, she was being celebrated as a French writer, and she was home where everyone spoke her language.

For the next decade, Yourcenar suffered from periodic depression, from living a mundane existence in a country "that would never be truly her own," having little money, and realizing that Europe was "off limits, mute, and devastated.

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Yourcenar's papers are located at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. She translated Virginia Woolf 's The Waves over a ten-month period in The play was not successful—"all in all, an absolute mess," one critic wrote. But she continued to write and to welcome journalists at Petite Plaisance; she was obviously preparing for a life after Frick died, and there was no question that she would be able to survive for many more years.

The s were years of continuous travel. Yourcenar's enduring legacy includes her groundbreaking literary achievements, her unwavering commitment to intellectual freedom, and her advocacy for a more just and equitable world. Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life.