![]() and it is something new in that its approach to a historical figure is in depth. It is a largely psychological novel and a meditation in history. The present edition contains the addition of “reflections” on the composition of the book, translated by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author, and with many illustrations which weren’t in the original first edition published ten years before. But certainly Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian come very close to equality with Broch’s novel. of course, the very best such novel: it has no peer. Here are two samples from American newspapers.įrom The Capital Times, March 26, 1964: It is cause for wonder that there are relatively few good novels of ancient Rome. The book was was highly praised in any language in which it was published. Yourcenar, who was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, assisted in the translation of Memoirs of Hadrian from French to English. In a prose of epigrammatic brilliance, Marguerite Yourcenar has painted an unforgettable self-portrait of Hadrian, as remarkable for its psychological depth as for its authentic recreation of time and place.” Hadrian appears as one of the Western world’s greatest liberals, a humanist who based man’s chances of happiness and security on the culture that was Greece and the great organizing power that was Rome. A tour de force of scholarship that uses Hadrian’s extant writings and the writings of historians, friends and enemies, It is a vivid reconstruction of the intimate life of the emperor and his entourage. “At once a psychological novel and a meditation on history, Memoirs of Hadrian is written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian (76-138 AD) to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius. As encapsulated from the Modern Library edition: The love they share is more passionate and real makes his marriage to Sabina. The time of Hadrian’s rule is described by him as his personal “age of Gold,” which he attributes to his lover, Antinous. He muses on his penchant for music, philosophy, and poetry and all things artistic and cultural. Hadrian continues this imagined memoir with tales of his military conquests. The novel, told from a first person person by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, begins with a letter to his adoptive grandson, who became Marcus Aurelius and his successor. “There are books,” she said later, “which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”Ĭonsidered this author’s masterwork, and the book she’s best remembered for, it was from the start a critical success. ![]() Many years in gestation, it was a book that, with the benefit of hindsight, she didn’t think she could have written when she was younger. ![]() It was an ambitious project many year in the making Yourcenar first had the idea for it in the 1920s, then worked on it, on and off, in the 1930s. Originally written in French, it was published in English in 1954. Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, the Belgian-born French writer, was first published in France in 1951.
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