BOOK REVIEW BIOGRAPHY : The Highly Colored Tapestry of the Life of a Literary Star : MARGUERITE YOURCENAR: Inventing a Life <i> by Josyane Savigneau</i> ; University of Chicago; $25, 527 pages

Reverse the order of title and subtitle, and you get something of the character of this biography of the distinguished and very distinct French writer, Marguerite Yourcenar.

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Carefully fashioning her public and literary persona, and keeping her private world largely concealed except for chosen bits, Yourcenar did, in a sense, invent her life. So we are told by Josyane Savigneau, who edits the literary section of Le Monde. But Savigneau, in a posthumous arm-wrestle with her subject’s silences and evasions, has produced “Marguerite Yourcenar,” a work that, painstaking as it is, sometimes feels like an invention as well.

Yourcenar, who died in 1987 at the age of 84, sculpted her remains. She destroyed some of her papers and correspondence and divided the rest into what is now available to a biographer, and what will remain sealed until 2037. The silenced journals and correspondence pertain essentially to her personal and particularly her emotional life: her lesbian affairs, two passionate attachments to men, both of them gay, and her 40-year “marriage” to Grace Frick, an American academic who became her lover, amanuensis and lifelong companion in their home in Maine.

This makes difficulties for a biographer, particularly since most of Yourcenar’s loves were dead and unable to offer their own testimony.

As for Frick, who died in 1979, Savigneau had to rely largely on recollections by Maine neighbors of a couple that kept its affairs to itself, on those of friends who visited from France, and on cryptic and perhaps not altogether trustworthy conversations with Yourcenar in the last three years of her life. Principally she used Frick’s daybook, a terse, prosaic daily record of their domestic and literary activities.

From these partial sources and a heavy dose of deductive reasoning, Savigneau weaves a highly colored tapestry of shifting battles of power and weakness, attachment and resentment. French biographers abhor a vacuum quite as much as nature does, and when they fall into cant it is the cant of a priori psychologizing.

The couple met in Paris in 1937 when both were 34. Yourcenar had already published two of her early successes, “Alexis” and “A Coin in Nine Hands.” With the enthusiastic backing of the critic Edmond Jaloux, she was becoming well-known in French literary circles, though her wider fame and success would await the publication of “Hadrian’s Memoirs” in the 1950s.

The war and Frick’s invitation brought Yourcenar to the United States; first to Hartford for 10 years, and then to Mount Desert Island, Maine, where they took up permanent residence. Yourcenar found herself stranded in a dull town, exiled from her language and her literary world, virtually unable to write and desperately poor.

Until she obtained a teaching job at Sarah Lawrence, she was dependent on Frick. Savigneau writes of their relationship from then on as a conflict between Frick’s jealous possessiveness and Yourcenar’s growing independence.

Four months after Frick died, in a tangle of guilt, reciprocal need, anger and love, Yourcenar entered the Academie Francaise as its first woman member. She came in a uniform designed by Dior--its black-and-white robe and shawl-hood contrasting with the froggy green of the male Academicians --and with a speech of cold chiseled rebuke, which except for the fugitive wit that haunted it like a lament, could have been Racine’s.

Although Savigneau is expressly not writing a critical biography, some of her best writing is devoted to Yourcenar’s work. She convincingly stresses the radical outlook of a writer whose classical style has sometimes put her out of fashion on the Left.

Savigneau is entertainingly in command of the feuds and politics of the postwar French literary world, and of Yourcenar’s fearsome battles with publishers. Breaking two successive contracts, Yourcenar took “Hadrian” from Gallimard and gave it to Plon; she then took “The Abyss” from Plon and gave it to Gallimard. She cited her “moral right” and no lawyer could stand against it, or her.