Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated by Walter Kaiser. 1985 Farrar Straus Giroux paperback edition (c/r 1929), 105 pages. Yourcenar was a gay French novelist and translator, notably of Virginia Woolf. Much of her work was translated by her partner Grace Frick while Frick was alive. According to the New York Times: "Marguerite Yourcenar, who was born in 1903 and died in 1987, was the last echo of a heroic chorus of European writers that included Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, older men whom she particularly admired and whose work influenced hers. Like them, she was a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture, a moralist with a taste for historical perspectives and a virtuoso equally at home in novels, stories and essays (she also wrote rather bad plays and poems)." Alexis was her debut. Condition: Used copy, some underlining "The letter, my dear, will be very long."
