Word: yourcenar
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...since the elite 40-member Académie Française was established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1634 to uphold France's literary standards, it has barred its doors to women. But now the "Immortals" have voted to breach France's macho line by admitting Novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, 76, author of Hadrian's Memoirs and acclaimed translator of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Though Yourcenar holds U.S. as well as French citizenships and has lived in Maine for 30 years, what bothered the twelve who opposed her was principally her gender. Philosopher Jean Guitton, 78, grumbled that...
...found time to write the equivalent of 16,000 Western printed pages. Official documents, letters, memoranda, verse and private thoughts were collected as the Venerable Record. In Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence, professor of Chinese history at Yale, has pruned and selected this record. In the tradition of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, he has created what he calls an "autobiographical biography." But it is more than that. From the Emperor's resplendent portrait on the dust jacket to the small ink drawings scattered throughout, the book is both an object of careful craft and a most...
...Terrain. Deiss chooses to tell his story from his subject's point of view, in a first-person chronicle supposedly set down by Frederick at the end of his life, the device used so well by Marguerite Yourcenar in Hadrian's Memoirs. To some extent the method sacrifices dramatic force-violence recollected in relative tranquillity is only the shadow of violence. But although Frederick, as warrior and sensualist, was at the center of many dramas, his life was lived in the far and lonely terrain of his own mind...
Bleak Theme. Marguerite Yourcenar has set down the story of the doomed Baltic civilization in a fable so barely told (in translation from the French) as to suggest basic English. It suits her bare, bleak theme. Her narrator is Erick von Lohmond of the Teutonic gentry. Too young for World War I, he grows up into one of the crudest of civil wars. The Red soldiers who come sweeping through the Baltic birch forests so hate the Czarist military system that when they capture a White officer they nail his hated epaulets to his shoulders or, because the officers...
...White soldier, who usually performs the executions with his pistol, comes to Erick and reports: "She orders . . . that is, Miss Sophie asks . . She wants it to be you." Erick obliges. His first shot blows half her face away. "On the second shot everything was over." With this, Novelist Yourcenar (Hadrian's Memoirs, TIME, Nov. 29, 1954) contrives to inject her own sharp sense of history in what is told within the emotional limits of three private destinies...