A review by anna_mackay
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

When she was 12, Marguerite de Crayencour and her father sat down to figure out her pen name, something that would look good on the cover of a book, and settled on Yourcenar. She came up with the idea for Memoirs of Hadrian when she was 20, and finished it when she was 48, later saying that some books you can only write past the age of 40. You can tell that decades of work have gone into it—it is thorough, precise, beautiful, unlike anything I have read before. Being a letter from Emperor Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius on his deathbed detailing his life, it is dense. It took me a couple weeks of sustained effort to read, but it was so well worth it. Truly an incredible book.