Novel
Memoirs of Hadrian
Mémoires d'Hadrien
Marguerite Yourcenar · 1951
Synopsis
From his villa at Tibur, the emperor Hadrian, old and ill, writes a long letter to his adoptive grandson, the future Marcus Aurelius, then seventeen years old. In it he retraces his life: his youth in Spain, the Dacian wars and the war against the Parthians, his doubtful adoption by Trajan, then a reign of peace, laws and travels, and his passion for the young Bithynian Antinous. In six parts, each with a Latin title, he meditates on power, love, beauty and death.
Context
The author had conceived the subject around the age of twenty, then destroyed her first drafts, in which Antinous was to be the narrator. In January 1949, while sorting old papers that had come back from Lausanne, she found a fragment of a later version and went back to the book, which appeared from Plon in 1951 and enjoyed international success. She attributed its origin to a sentence of Flaubert's: “Les dieux n'étant plus et le Christ n'étant pas encore, il y a eu, de Cicéron à Marc Aurèle, un moment unique où l'homme seul a été.” Grace Frick provided the English translation.
Who it is for
A novel in the form of a letter, in the first person, with no dialogue; a classical, dense language, drawing on ancient sources.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author famous, through an immediate international success from 1951.