Marguerite Yourcenar

Yourcenar's name was an anagram she constructed from her birth surname, Crayencour, part of a lifelong self-fashioning that included fluency in classical antiquity acquired through a largely home-taught, book-saturated childhood in France and Belgium. She began Memoirs of Hadrian in her twenties, destroyed the manuscript, and returned to it only in her forties, rebuilding the emperor's fictional deathbed letter from years of classical scholarship until its 1951 publication made her famous.

She spent most of her adult life with her American translator and partner Grace Frick on Mount Desert Island, Maine, eventually taking U.S. citizenship. The Abyss, following a Renaissance physician-alchemist fleeing the Inquisition, extended her fascination with minds ahead of their era. In 1980 she became the first woman elected to the Académie française in its three-and-a-half-century history.