SPECIAL REPORT: When MDI had a warm hearth for famous, gay women
SOMESVILLE, Oct. 3, 2024 - It took me years but this summer I finally found the grave markers of Madame Marguerite Yourcenar and her lifelong partner Grace Frick, who translated Yourcenar’s masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian into English.
I was assisted by Joan Howard, director of Petite Plaisance, Yourcenar and Frick’s summer home on South Shore Road in Northeast Harbor, which is preserved exactly as they left it. I toured the house on the last day it was open this season in late September. Howard gave me a map showing the location of the graves at the Brookside Cemetery in Somesville.
Even then, I toiled a bit before locating them underneath a grove of trees. They were each only about 10 inches wide. They were next to the graves for Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson and wife.
I learned about Yourcenar a decade ago from my late French brother-in-law, who was among thousands of devotees who made the pilgrimage to Brookside Cemetery since her death in 1987.
Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980. In 1965, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Historian and writer Carl Little, who lives on the island, moved here a year after Yourcenar’s death. In 2018, he wrote an essay in Chebacco, the magazine of the Mount Desert Historical Society, in which he fantasized meeting Yourcenar:
“It’s in the Northeast Harbor Library or perhaps at the Colonel’s bakery, and I introduce myself, speaking the French I have recently acquired through graduate studies at Middlebury College. Yourcenar is pleased with my accent and appearance and invites me home for tea. We sit in her kitchen …and speak of Piranesi’s prison series, of Hadrian, of Brookside Cemetery (where, I tell her, my children play hide-and-seek among the tombstones).”
Recently I made a point of meeting Little to tell him how much I admired his work.
He had written in Chebacco,
“Mount Desert Island would become Yourcenar’s refuge, her home base, to which she would, over the years, return from her extensive travels. While she didn’t attach ‘a great deal of importance to the house itself,’ it served, she said, ‘as an asylum, a cell for self-knowledge, as Saint Catherine of Siena might have said.’
“Petite Plaisance would prove to be the perfect place for writing; Yourcenar completed two of her most acclaimed books, Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss, while in residence, and many of her other works were composed and/or edited there.”
While researching this article, I made another extraordinary discovery. Raney Bench, the current director of the historical society, told me about The Lesbian History Trail of Mount Desert Island, an online roadmap to famous gay women who lived here.
“From Jane Addams to Marguerite Yourcenar, Mount Desert Island has been home to some of the most prominent artists, thinkers, writers, reformers, and activists in the world, and many of these women were in long-term, same-sex partnerships, or ‘Boston Marriages.’
“Many of these women were part of national and international networks of lesbians of achievement - networks that included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who, in July 1933, came to have tea in Southwest Harbor with her friends Mary Dreier and Frances Kellor.”
According to the book, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II, The Defining Years, 1933-1938, by Blanche Wiesen Cook, Viking, 1999:
“Fernald Point is the address of the historical summer home of social reformer and philanthropist Mary Dreier and her partner Frances Kellor, who is one of the most spectacular activists and reformers of the Roosevelt era, especially in the field of immigration. These two women lived together for 47 years, summering in Southwest Harbor. Frances Kellor wore men's clothing most of her life, as you can see in the photograph below taken on July 22, 1933.
”In June 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt traveled by car with her lesbian friends, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, to open up the cottage at Campobello and prepare for Franklin’s arrival. They stopped off in Southwest Harbor to stay with Frances and Mary. She was somewhat discomfited to learn that Mary had planned a large lawn party for the next day.
"The next morning Eleanor awoke to discover that ‘FDR and the whole fleet’ had anchored outside Mary Dreier’s home in Southwest Harbor. She worried that it was ‘rather overpowering for Mary Dreier, but she seemed pleased.’ Eleanor’s three sons went ashore for breakfast, and FDR invited Eleanor and her party aboard the Amberjack II for lunch. By all accounts it was a ’joyous reunion...' After FDR’s detour to Mary Dreier, he continued his cruise while Eleanor headed directly for Campobello to make beds and prepare the great welcoming picnic to celebrate FDR’s first visit in twelve years…"
The Lesbian History Tour website was created by Carolyn Gage, author and playwright, who conceived of the site and designed the itineraries. A resident of Maine for 25 years, she has lived in Southwest Harbor since 2016.
Gage was assisted by Tina Gianoulis, a freelance writer and a lesbian of Greek and Southern heritage who wrote all “The Stories” on the website.
Double click this video to view Gage’s presentation at the Southwest Harbor Public Library three years ago.
Yourcenar loved the libraries in this country as opposed to their stark academic counterparts in France, said Joan Howard. No doubt she spent time in Northeast Harbor library, where I found a copy of Memoirs of Hadrian.
It was one of the most unusual literary works I have ever read. Howard assured me that Frick’s translation itself was a work of art, and accurate to its original version in French. It’s tempting to categorize it simply, as many have, as “historical fiction,” which I found to be claustrophobic and confining. The book has a vastness which is part philosophy and part history, interlaced with some strong psychological bends.
The novel is a letter from a dying Roman Emperor Hadrian to his successor and adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. (Did Yourcenar intend it to be a precursor to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as Hadrian reflected upon his life and reign as one of Rome’s most notable emperors?)
Here are two of its most famous passages:
“From each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality.”
“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
I was not the only person unfamiliar with the island’s lesbian trail. Town Manager Durlin Lunt hadn’t heard of it even though his wife Jean was Yourcenar’s former secretary and managed her summer house for a time.
According to the Lesbian History Trail, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis spent five summers here in a cottage on the grounds of the Asticou Inn. Ruth Moore (1903–1989) is the only woman on the Lesbian History Trail who was born in Maine, and on Gott’s Island, which is part of the town of Tremont.
Great article! Thanks! I read Wella Cather’s. “My Antonia” 3 years ago in my class of American Novels
And don't forget Eleanor Mayo, Miriam Colwell, Berenice Abbott, Chennie Hall, Ruth Storm & her partner Meda Benoit. . . What times they all had!