Old Ladies

D.A.N. Jones

• Dear Departed: A Memoir by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Maria Louise Ascher
  Aidan Ellis, 346 pp, £18.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 85628 186 7
• Anna, Soror by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser
  Harvill, 256 pp, £7.99, May 1992, ISBN 0 00 271222 9
• That Mighty Sculptor, Time by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser
  Aidan Ellis, 224 pp, £18.00, June 1992, ISBN 0 85628 159 X
• Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir by Doris Grumbach
  Norton, 256 pp, £13.95, April 1992, ISBN 0 393 03009 1
• Anything Once by Joan Wyndham
  Sinclair-Stevenson, 178 pp, £15.95, March 1992, ISBN 1 85619 129 X
• Within Tuscany by Matthew Spender
  Viking, 366 pp, £16.99, April 1992, ISBN 0 670 83836 5

Marguerite Yourcenar was a highly honoured French writer, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, but her mother came from the Low Countries. The mother died in 1903, eight days after the daughter’s birth: her married name was Fernande de Crayencour (from which the pen name ‘Yourcenar’ was constructed) and her maiden name was de Cartier de Marchienne. In 1974, Marguerite Yourcenar published Souvenirs pieux (the first volume of her memoirs, Le Labyrinthe du monde), but it is a ‘memoir’ that never deals directly with the author. The book is about Fernande, her family and ancestors, over several centuries in what is now called Belgium. They were people who could take the concept of ‘pious memories’ quite seriously or, at least, formally.