Marguerite Yourcenar (born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour) was born in Brussels to a French father and Belgian mother.
Marguerite Yourcenar was born on June 8, 1903, in Brussels, Belgium, as Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour. Her father, Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, was a French aristocrat, and her mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, was Belgian.
Tragically, her mother died of puerperal fever just ten days after giving birth, and Marguerite was raised primarily by her father, who provided her with an unconventional, cosmopolitan, and largely private education across France, England, and Italy. This early exposure to classical languages, literature, and multiple cultures profoundly shaped her later work as a novelist deeply engaged with history and antiquity.
She would later construct the pen name 'Yourcenar' as a near-anagram of her family name Crayencour, a name she adopted for her literary career and eventually legalized. Her birth in a bourgeois, intellectually rich but emotionally isolated environment is often cited by biographers as foundational to the introspective, erudite, and historically-minded sensibility that would define her fiction, most famously in Memoirs of Hadrian.
Her birthplace and unusual upbringing gave her a lifelong sense of being an outsider to conventional French literary and social circles, which she later transcended spectacularly by becoming the first woman elected to the Académie française.