Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. She started writing early, particularly poetry, and had her first collection published when she was nineteen. She adopted the pseudonym Yourcenar which is more or less an anagram of Crayencour, her real name. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3. Escaping the outbreak of World War II, Yourcenar moved to the United States with her companion Grace Frick who also translated her major novels. She is best known for her novel Mémoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian).