Volume 23, Number 16 · October 14, 1976
A Successful Alchemist
By Frank Kermode
The Abyss
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated in collaboration with the author by Grace Frick
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 374 pp., $10.00
Historical novels continue to be written in considerable numbers, though most of them attract little attention from reviewers. From time to time there develops a more or less fervid cult of some practitioner—of Bryher, for example, now half-forgotten, or of Robert Graves or Mary Renault. But The Memoirs of Hadrian, first published in English twenty-two years ago, seems to have given Marguerite Yourcenar a special place in the modern history of the genre.
Review, 2531 words
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