SOURCE: "Rise and Fall of an Emperor: Mémoires d'Hadrien," in her From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 184-219.

Howard is an American critic and educator who has done extensive research into Yourcenar's life and works. In the following essay, she examines the narrative structure of Memoirs of Hadrian and the life of its narrator and main character.

Mémoires d'Hadrien was the work that, in 1951, catapulted Marguerite Yourcenar to international literary prominence. Begun and abandoned several times over the course of the preceding decades, this fictionalized autobiography of one of the last enlightened Roman emperors takes the form of a letter to Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian's eventual successor. The book was the fruit, by the author's own admission, of a certain postwar optimism regarding the future of mankind. In the speech that Yourcenar delivered upon the occasion of...