A Book Rescue

I rescued three paperback books from the wastebasket at the Morningside Heights branch of the New York Public Library. Two of them are by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987): A Coin in Nine Hands and Two Lives and a Dream. (The third book, Marianne Moore, is a study of her life and poetry.)

My introduction to Yourcenar was a Selected Shorts reading on the radio of one of her short stories. I'm looking forward to reading her two books. Skimming through them, they looked very inviting.

To get a little background on her, I consulted my copy of The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage and learned that Yourcenar "was a lesbian who spent forty-two years with the same woman; yet she spoke of homosexuality in her work almost exclusively through male characters."