In the Twenties, every interviewer asked his subject for views about the Modern Girl. With Open Eyes is an engaging introduction to her work, imbued with an unexpected spirit of comedy, rather like Boswell’s life of Johnson – for Mme Yourcenar, like Johnson, is a weighty and judicial writer, contemplating many eras and continents, while Matthieu Galey is a journalist determined to ask ‘Just exactly how do you feel?’ about the issues of the day. Galey’s interviews has been made by Arthur Goldhammer, working with the nervous precision demanded by his knowledge that Mme Yourcenar is herself a fastidious translator: she has translated The Waves and What Maisie Knew into French. The title of the book was a quotation from Mme Yourcenar’s novel, Memoirs of Hadrian: ‘Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.’ Galey, a French journalist, had been to interview her on Mount Desert Island. In that same year, Les Yeux Ouverts: Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey was published in Paris. However, the justice minister granted her dual nationality on the grounds of her ‘evident cultural links’ with France, and in 1980 she became the first woman member of the Academy. Thus when she was proposed for membership of the French Academy, it was natural that some Frenchmen would make an issue of her nationality, in order to prevent a woman joining their club. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine.

Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903.

Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar