Marguerite Yourcenar

The story of the fate of two cousins in sixteenth century northern France. The younger, sixteen-year-old Henry Maximilian, has set out to become a soldier and a poet. The elder, twenty-two-year-old Zeno, has left the seminary to make himself an alchemist-philosopher.

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his …