The Environment and Marguerite Yourcenar

This study is the first full-length discussion of Le Labyrinthe du monde by Marguerite Yourcenar along environmental lines. Her most ambitious undertaking, the three-volume work, composed over a decade and a half, was written by the first académicienne more than twenty years after Mémoires d¿Hadrien. The study draws extensively on the rich reserves of Yourcenar scholarship as well as on environmental humanities. The result is a review of a broad set of considerations of time, place and interconnectedness. While Yourcenar¿s text engages often in detail and certainly in depth with her parents and their forebears, this study seeks to show how, through its loose-limbed, quasi-plot structure, the author proffers her extensive genealogical heritage as a way of reading and understanding the global and the modern. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful and deeply reflective writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.