Marguerite Yourcenar''s Hadrian: Writing the Life of a Roman Emperor

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known as the author of the 1951 novel Mémoires dHadrien, her recreation of the life of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The work can be examined from the perspective of the issues raised by writing Roman imperial biography at large and the many ways in which Mémoires has a claim to historical authenticity.

In Marguerite Yourcenars Hadrian, Keith Bradley explains how Mémoires dHadrien came to be written, gives details of Yourcenars own biography, and describes some of the intricate historical problems that her novels portrait of Hadrian presents. He draws on Yourcenars correspondence, her interviews with journalists, and her literary corpus as a whole, emphasizing Yourcenars profound knowledge of the ancient evidence on which her life of Hadrian is based and exploiting a wide range of contemporary Yourcenarian criticism.

The book pays special attention to the methods by which Yourcenar believed Hadrians life history to be recoverable, compares examples of modern life-writing, and contrasts the procedures of conventional Roman biographers. Revealing how and why Mémoires dHadrien is as it is, Marguerite Yourcenars Hadrian illustrates how imaginative literary recreation is often little different from historical speculation.