reviews_and_ramblings | Grace Frick (January 12, 1903

Died: 1979
People also search for: Marguerite Yourcenar, more
Lived: 549 Prospect Ave, Hartford, CT 06105, USA (41.76378, -72.71623)
Petite Plaisance, 35 S Shore Rd, Northeast Harbor, ME 04662, USA (44.28888, -68.28585)
Studied: Wellesley College
Buried: Brookside Cemetery, Mount Desert, Hancock County, Maine, USA
Buried alongside: Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar (born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, of French bourgeois descent, and a Belgian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, of Belgian nobility) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. In 1939 literary scholar and Kansas City native Grace Frick, invited the writer to the United States to escape the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Frick was a graduate of Wellesley College and did her postgraduate work at Yale. She taught at Stephens College, Columbus, at Barnard College. Yourcenar lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College. Yourcenar was bisexual and she and Frick became lovers in 1937, and would remain so until Frick's death in 1979. After ten years spent in Hartford, they bought a house together in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine and lived there for decades. They are both buried at Brookside Cemetery, Mount Desert, Maine.
Together from 1937 to 1979: 42 years.
Grace Frick (1903-1979)
Marguerite Yourcenar (June 8, 1903 – December 17, 1987)

Days of Love edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
ISBN-10: 1500563323
Release Date: September 21, 2014
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/4910282
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Marguerite Yourcenar arrived in Hartford in 1939. WWII was breaking out in Europe, but Yourcenar had chosen life in America with Grace Frick, a Wellesley graduate she had met in Paris in 1934 and fallen in love with “head over heels.” Shortly after Yourcenar arrived in the United States, Frick got a job as academic dean of Hartford Junior College, now Hartford College for Women. They rented a house at 549 Prospect Ave.
Address: 549 Prospect Ave, Hartford, CT 06105, USA (41.76378, -72.71623)
Type: Private Property
National Register of Historic Places: West End South Historic District (Roughly bounded by Farmington Ave., Whitney and S. Whitney Sts., West Blvd. and Prospect Ave.), 85000763, 1985
Place
Marguerite Yourcenar’s French biographer, Josyane Savigneau, calls Hartford “a rather uninteresting city about a hundred miles from New York.” Yourcenar herself called it “reactionary, chauvinist and Protestant, with a hint of worldliness.” In Savigneau’s book, there are photos of Frick and Yourcenar leaning out of a window of the Prospect Avenue house, “photographs of love, the sort of childish demonstrations of happiness one can’t resist when in the thrall of a passion.” During her decade in Hartford, Yourcenar fell in with one major representative of the avant-garde in town: A. Everett “Chick” Austin Jr., who had turned the Wadsworth Atheneum from a stodgy small-city museum into a cultural movement. Austin was commissioning a theatrical-dance work based on the four elements -- earth, air, fire, water -- and for “Water,” Yourcenar wrote a piece based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Mermaid.” “Chick danced in every one,” says Eugene R. Gaddis, the Atheneum’s archivist and Austin’s biographer. Yourcenar blamed herself for suggesting in 1945 that Austin stage the Elizabethan play “Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” “a story of an incestuous young couple, a brother and sister, who brave all sorts of slander to their love.” Reactionary Hartford was not amused, and gave Austin the boot. She wrote the work for which she is best known in America, “Memoirs of Hadrian,” while she lived in Hartford in the 1940s. The novel is in the form of a series of letters from the Roman emperor, on the eve of his death, to his successor. She wrote numerous other novels and short stories, plays and essays, and translated Virginia Woolf, Henry James and African American spirituals into French. Gaddis interviewed Yourcenar at her book-filled home in Maine in 1982, three years after Frick’s death and two years after Yourcenar had become the first woman elected to the French Academy. “Chick Austin was air and fire,” she recalled. She made Gaddis an omelet with vegetables from her kitchen garden and then asked him, in a thick French accent, “Eugene, will you go to the refrigerator and get us a couple of Budweisers?” She died in 1989.
Life
Who: Marguerite Yourcenar (June 8, 1903 – December 17, 1987) and Grace Frick (1903-1979)
Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick lived in Hartford, to be near Grace’s work, first at Hartford Junior College, then at Connecticut College. Soon Yourcenar, too, began teaching, commuting to Sarah Lawrence, just outside New York City, where she gave courses in French and Italian.

Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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After ten years spent in Hartford, Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar bought a house together in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine and lived there for decades.
Address: 35 S Shore Rd, Northeast Harbor, ME 04662, USA (44.28888, -68.28585)
Type: Museum (open to public)
Phone:+1 207-276-3940
Place
You can wander behind the modest house of the late novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, Petite Plaisance, and through the Japanese garden to the little headstone of her dog, inscribed, "A gentle heart in a small body." At the turn of the XX century, Bar Harbor, the onetime fishing village on the eastern coast of Mount Desert Island, was Maine’s premier resort—a glamorous enclave of regal cottages and lavish entertainments for the few and the wealthy. They ran it like a country club until the great fire of 1947 destroyed everything. As the upper crust migrated 10 miles south, to Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor, what rose from the rubble was a noisy, lively resort on the move. Northeast Harbor is a village on Mount Desert Island, located in the town of Mount Desert in Hancock County, Maine. The village has a significant summer population, and has long been a quiet enclave of the rich and famous. Summer residents include the Rockefeller family, as well as the late Brooke Astor and Barbara Bel Geddes. The village was at a time so popular as a summer resort among Philadelphians that it was sometimes known as "Philadelphia on the rocks.” Northeast Harbor is the home of Morris Yacht Brokerage. The village is home to the Asticou Azalea Garden.
Life
Who: Marguerite Yourcenar (June 8, 1903 – December 17, 1987) and Grace Frick (1903-1979)
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3. In 1939 Yourcenar’s intimate companion at the time, the literary scholar and Kansas City native Grace Frick, invited the writer to the United States to escape the outbreak of WWII in Europe. Yourcenar lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College. Yourcenar was bisexual; she and Frick became lovers in 1937 and remained together until Frick’s death in 1979. They are buried side by side across the sound in Somesville at Brookside Cemetery (Mt Desert, ME 04660). Yourcenar’s house on Mount Desert Island, Petite Plaisance, is now a museum dedicated to her memory.