SOURCE: "Marguerite Yourcenar," in An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th-Century Literature, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987, pp. 157-61.

Birkerts is an American critic and educator who has won numerous awards and grants for his essays on literature. In the following essay, which was originally published in 1984, he addresses the theme of male homosexuality in Alexis and Memoirs of Hadrian.

In her "Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian," Marguerite Yourcenar has described in some detail the halting yet seemingly fated progress of that book. Originally begun between 1924 and 1930, abandoned, resumed, it was abandoned again before the war, for the last time—or so the author thought then. In 1948, however, when Yourcenar was living in America, and old trunk full of papers and letters was returned to her. She tells how she seated herself in front of a fire and undertook the sad reconnaissance of her past. Letters...