Literary Trailblazer

When Marguerite Yourcenar was elected the first woman member of the Academie Francaise in 1980, she modestly paid tribute to the “invisible troop of women that perhaps should have received this honor sooner.” Sooner indeed. Her companion and translator, the late Grace Frick, was convinced that Yourcenar had been denied important literary honors in the nation of her birth simply because she was a woman.

Yourcenar lived most of her life after 1937 in the United States, the last 37 years in a home surrounded by gardens and forest in Northeast Harbor on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, where she died Thursday at age 84. There she worked, at a long table, with a typewriter for her and another for Frick. There she would receive friends at lunch, preparing her own recipe of soup while Frick baked French bread, and eating at a tableset among the flowers of summer to explore the extraordinary spectrum of her interests--history, philosophy, protection of the environment. Paths were cut through the forest, with occasional benches under the trees, for quiet strolls and contemplation. That house will now be maintained as a museum, its rich library preserved.

Future generations of Americans may come to know her better through that library than the present generation knows her through her writing. The internationally acclaimed “The Memoirs of Hadrian” alone achieved popular success in the United States. Most of her works were never translated into English, but she translated dozens of American works into French. If readers found her works too difficult for them to become best-sellers, there was at least abiding respect for the victory that she won for the “invisible troop.”