BECOMING THE EMPEROR Acocella, Joan
The New Yorker,
02/2005, Letnik:
81, Številka:
1
Magazine Article
"In 1981, six years before her death, Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman ever inducted into the Academie Francaise, and that weighty honor has been hanging around the neck of her reputation ...ever since...But that wasn't all that set her apart from other mid-century writers. She was an extremely isolated artist. A Frenchwoman, she spent most of her adult life in the United States, on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine, where, to isolate her further, she lived with a woman. Her background, too, made her seem different. She came from the minor nobility and didn't hide it...She wrote not in English but in her native French, and in a style that was often magisterial, in an old-fashioned, classical way...Add, moreover, that though she was a novelist, she was not primarily a realist, that she never mastered dialogue, that her books were ruminative, philosophical." (New Yorker) This overview of Yourcenar's unconventional life and exceptional literary oeuvre evaluates her "greatest novel, 'Memoirs of Hadrian' (1951)." The story's autobiographical elements are explored.