Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar was a French novelist, essayist and translator, born in Brussels on 8 June 1903 and died on 17 December 1987. She was raised in a cultured household and educated largely at home, reading the classics early. She published her first work as a young woman and later moved to the United States, where she lived for decades and eventually became an American citizen while continuing to write in French. Her fiction is known for its learned, measured prose and for imagining the inner lives of figures from the past, especially in the ancient and Renaissance worlds. She also wrote essays, translations and memoirs of her family. In 1980 she became the first woman elected to the Académie française. She matters because she showed how historical fiction could be a serious meditation on power, time, solitude and the search for freedom.