Memoirs of Hadrian

Both an exploration of character and a meditation on history, Marguerite Yourcenar's classic novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, has received international acclaim since its initial publication in France in 1951.

Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, the work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. In it, Yourcenar reimagines Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his reordering of a worn-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own time.