Marguerite Yourcenar received critical acclaim for her first novel ‘Alexis’ that centred around a title character who comes out as gay to his wife. Her literary accomplishments positioned her to become the first woman elected to the prestigious Académie Française (“French Academy”), an organization founded in 1635 dedicated to the preservation of the French language with a membership limited to only 40 linguistic scholars. She is widely admired for her masterful use of historical settings to explore modern issues and universal themes. She translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937. Marguerite Yourcenar’s first novel titled ‘Alexis’ was published in 1929.

She adopted the surname Yourcenar – an almost anagram of Crayencour, having one fewer c – as a pen name in 1947 she also took it as her legal surname. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother. She lost her mother on the tenth day of her birth. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner. Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels in Belgium on June 8, 1903. Google dedicates a beautiful doodle on her birthday on June 8. Google today celebrates the 117 th birthday of Marguerite Yourcenar, the world-famous French novelist and essayist, who later became a US citizen in 1947.

Devdiscourse News Desk | Paris | Updated: 08-06-2020 00:31 IST | Created: 08-06-2020 00:31 IST Marguerite Yourcenar received critical acclaim for her first novel ‘Alexis’ that centred around a title character who comes out as gay to his wife.

Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar