Unsettled Passion: Marguerite Yourcenar
She was here, she was there, she was everywhere, even as a child traveling about Europe with her father. And she never lost her taste for traveling the world.
Marguerite Yourcenar, born in Belgium in 1903 but raised in France, not only travelled the world, she conquered the world through her novels, essays, and short stories. It took her 77 years but finally, in 1980, Yourcenar broke one of the most impenetrable literary barriers in the world as the first woman ever admitted into the prestigious Académie Française, an institution established in 1635! What took 77 years for Yourcenar to accomplish, it took 345 years for that august institution to admit that women could create literature. Brava Marguerite Yourcenar!
It was said, by admirers and critics alike, that she wrote more like a man than a woman. One critic, whose name has been lost to history—but whose snark has not—wrote that her work did not contain “those often charming weaknesses…by which one identifies a feminine pen.”
Yourcenar herself didn’t entirely disagree. According to Yourcenar biographer Joseyane Sauvigneau, she would often write from the male point of view, putting herself into the headspace of a strong male protagonist. About writing from within the mind of Hadrian, emperor of Ancient Rome, in her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar said that it was difficult for her, if sometimes impossible, to write a woman as a main character, because, at that time, “the life of a woman was too limited or too secret.” The men she often wrote about were also likely to be male homosexual characters. She wrote of their passion, which she amply expressed in Memoirs of Hadrian. The emperor’s affection for his male lover is considered one of the great homosexual love stories in literature.
But what of Yourcenar’s love life?
She was clearly bisexual. After her father’s death in 1929, 26-year-old Yourcenar continued to travel extensively. Again according to biographer Sauvigneau, as well as other sources, during these travels Yourcenar had affairs with women as well as with men. Some affairs were robust and satisfying; others were not.
Among those which broke Yourcenar’s heart was her pursuit of André Fraigneau, her editor at Éditions Grasset, a French publishing firm which had published Yourcenar’s works. The problem was that while Yourcenar was bisexual, Fraigneau was strictly homosexual. He loved Yourcenar’s intellect and literary genius; he did not love her body or her heart. Yourcenar used the pain of that unconsummated passion in her novella Coup de Grace.
Though still pining for Fraigneau, romantic stability finally arrived for Yourcenar in 1937 when she met Grace Frick, an American professor of English vacationing in Paris. Their meeting was not the typical meet-and-greet. According to anecdotal evidence, Yourcenar was having a drink with a friend at the bar of the Wegman Hotel. The two were said to be in lively discussion about the poet Samuel Tayor Coleridge. Professor Frick, whose academic expertise was English literature, overheard the conversation and went to their table, where she corrected what she felt were their incorrect interpretations of Coleridge’s poetry.
Whatever Frick said about Coleridge must’ve been a truly unique pickup line, because a year later Yourcenar crossed the Atlantic and moved in with Frick.
They lived together for 40 years, mostly in a house on Mount Desert Island, Maine, until Frick’s death in 1979. Their domestic life was more than merely romantic. Frick not only became Yourcenar’s first reader of the writer’s work, but translated Yourcenar’s writings from French to English, assisted with Yourcenar’s research for her historical pieces, and arranged the couple’s social life, a task Yourcenar was more than happy to hand off the Frick.
Upon Frick’s death, Yourcenar’s passion for travel and for romantic passion reasserted themselves. Though her travels were somewhat restricted due to advancing age and illness, her need for a life of passion resulted in a relationship with a 30-year-old gay man named Jerry Wilson. The two were inseparable and traveled through Europe as well as to various locales in Africa. Their relationship continued until Wilson's death of AIDS in 1986.
Yourcenar, now alone and in failing health, unable to travel and unable to write, died a year later in December 1987.
In our LGBTQ+ world of creativity, populated by scores of notable artists, writers, musicians, and performers of all types, Marguerite Yourcenar is in exceptional company. Marguerite Yourcenar was a brilliant, headstrong, and ornery woman who defied expectations. Her literary voice remains one of the strongest not just in queer literature, but in the literature of the world. ▼
Ann Aptaker is the author of short stories and the Lambda & Goldie award winning Cantor Gold series. Her latest book, A Crime of Secrets, was released July 4, 2023.
Photo:Bernhard De Grendel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons