SOURCE: "Marguerite Yourcenar's Sexual Politics in Fiction, 1939," in Faith of a (Woman) Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 221-28.

Johnston is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on twentieth-century history and literature. In the following essay, which was originally presented at a conference on twentieth-century women writers held at Hofstra University in the fall of 1982, she analyzes the sexual and political relationships of the three main characters in Coup de Grâce, arguing that they reflect "the European state of mind" on the brink of World War II.

Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the Académie Française, is a French novelist and dramatist, born in Brussels in 1903, who resides on Mount Desert Island in Maine. She published her first play in 1921; her most famous novel in the United States is Memoirs of Hadrian; she translated Virginia Woolf's...