Marguerite Yourcenar died at age 84 in Bar Harbor, Maine, at Petite Plaisance, the home she shared with her longtime partner Grace Frick.
Marguerite Yourcenar died on December 17, 1987, at the age of 84, at her home Petite Plaisance in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine, following a stroke. She had lived in the United States since 1939, having emigrated from Europe with her partner and translator Grace Frick, an American academic whom she met in Paris.
Petite Plaisance, the house the two women shared for decades, became the site of much of Yourcenar's most celebrated writing, including revisions and completion of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) and The Abyss (L'Œuvre au Noir, 1968). After Frick's death in 1979, Yourcenar continued to live and write at Petite Plaisance, which has since been preserved as a museum and historic site dedicated to her life and work, maintained by the Petite Plaisance Trust.
Her death marked the end of a literary career that spanned over six decades and included novels, essays, poetry, and memoirs distinguished by their historical erudition, psychological depth, and meditations on identity, mortality, and the human condition. She was interred in the Somesville Cemetery on Mount Desert Island, near her adopted American home rather than in France, reflecting her deeply international and self-determined identity. Her legacy endures through her body of work, her status as the first woman elected to the Académie française, and the continued academic and popular interest in her historical novels, which remain touchstones of twentieth-century world literature.