Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated by Grace Frick. 1984 first Modern Library edition (c/r 1963), 347 pages. Yourcenar was a gay French novelist and translator, notably of Virginia Woolf. Much of her work was translated by her partner Grace Frick while Frick was alive. According to the New York Times: "Marguerite Yourcenar, who was born in 1903 and died in 1987, was the last echo of a heroic chorus of European writers that included Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, older men whom she particularly admired and whose work influenced hers. Like them, she was a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture, a moralist with a taste for historical perspectives and a virtuoso equally at home in novels, stories and essays (she also wrote rather bad plays and poems)." Memoirs of Hadrian is written as a "testamentary" letter from the emperor to Marcus Aurelius.

Condition: VG. Owner name on first page.

"Do not mistake me; I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear."