Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Marguerite Yourcenar, Alchemist, Rhoda Lerman

The Courier

Marguerite Yourcenar worked with full consciousness and deep knowledge in the language and landscape of alchemy. She was not only writing books; she was remaking her soul. In the "Reflections on the Composition of The Memoirs of Hadrian", appendixed to the novel, she notes that she writes "with one foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts, or more accurately, without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports one's self in thought into another's body and soul". In The Memoirs of Hadrian we enter the territory of the landscape with her. In The Abyss we read …