SOURCE: "Remembering a World She Never Knew," in The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1992, p. 13.

In the following review of Dear Departed, Beaver praises Yourcenar's imaginative evocation of her mother's and father's families, describing the book as "a key to the genetic sources from which [her consciousness derived."]

Marguerite Yourcenar never wrote an autobiography. What she had completed by the time of her death in 1987 at the age of 84 was a Tristram Shandy-like saga that opens on the day of her birth and then moves resolutely backward to embrace both her father's and her mother's families in three memorial volumes: Souvenirs Pieux, Archives du Nord and Quoi? L'Eternité. Dear Departed is a smooth English translation of Souvenirs Pieux (1974), devoted to her Belgian ancestry on her mother's side.

Instead of a self-portrait tracing the growth of her own consciousness, then, Yourcenar has supplied a key to the...