Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite de Crayencour in Brussels in 1903; her mother died shortly after her birth and she was brought up and educated by her father. She was reading Racine and Aristophanes by the age of eight and her father taught her Latin at ten, and Greek at twelve. When she was eighteen he paid for the publication of her first book of poetry and together they worked out her pen name - an inexact anagram of Crayencour. After her father's death when she was twenty-four, she continued to travel throughout Europe.

Her first novel Alexis was published in 1929; several essays and collections of stories followed and by 1939 her reputation as a writer was established. Later her great friend, the translator Grace Frick, invited her to America. There she lectured in comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and translated in her spare time. She also began work again on Memoirs of Hadrian (she had burned an earlier version of the manuscript) and when the book was published in France in 1951 it was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim.

Marguerite Yourcenar won several literary honours but in 1981 she entered the ranks of the 'Immortals' when she was elected - the first woman ever to be so - to the Académie Française. One of the most respected writers in the French language, she published many novels, several plays, critical essays and poetry, as well as three volumes of memoirs. Her letters and journals, including her correspondence with Grace Frick, have been deposited with Harvard University, where they will remain sealed until fifty years after her death. She died in December 1988.