Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980. She was nominated for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Yourcenar in 1982
Marguerite Yourcenar's funeral plate. The epitaph, written in French, is from The Abyss: «Plaise à Celui qui Est peut-être de dilater le cœur de l'homme à la mesure de toute la vie.», which can be translated to "May it please the One who is perchance to expand the human heart to life's full measure."
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse. The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury. They reward French-language works written in prose or verse, by both women and men. The winner is announced on the first Wednesday of November each year.
The Prix Femina committee in 1926.