Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman elected to the prestigious Académie Française. A self-taught scholar, novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator, widely traveled and well read, Yourcenar brought a broadly based sensibility to her literary work. Her writings treat the dawn of time and the future; the physical and the spiritual worlds; characters ranging from peasants to emperors, from courtesans to Hindu gods; nature and civilizations; the arts and religion. Although she frequently ignored or defied literary styles, the advice of critics, and the conventions of Parisian literary life, Yourcenar managed to reach and appeal to a wide audience in France and throughout the world.

Despite her prediction that Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951; translated as Memoirs of Hadrian, 1954) would find an audience of "a few students of human destiny," it is her best-known work, in part because of its portrayal of the ideal prince...