Mémoires d'Hadrien Reading Order

Mémoires d'Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951) by Marguerite Yourcenar is one of the great historical novels of the twentieth century and the work that established Yourcenar as one of the major figures of French literature — she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980. The novel is a letter written by the Roman Emperor Hadrian (76–138 AD) to his young friend Marcus Aurelius, the future emperor, as Hadrian lies dying. It covers the whole of Hadrian's life and reign: his campaigns in Dacia and the East, his relationship with the young Greek Antinous (who drowned in the Nile at twenty, in circumstances that remain mysterious, and whom Hadrian deified and made the object of an empire-wide cult), his administrative achievements (the reconstruction of Athens, the codification of Roman law, the building of the Wall in Britain), his relationship with his wife Sabina, and his meditations on power, beauty, death, and the nature of Rome. Yourcenar spent twenty years working on Mémoires d'Hadrien, and the result is a novel of extraordinary historical and psychological density: Hadrian's voice is convincingly Roman, deeply literate, and temperamentally complex in ways that feel both ancient and entirely contemporary. The novel's profound meditation on the meaning of a life of power, beauty, and loss has made it one of the most widely read French novels of the twentieth century.