Joan E. Howard

Joan E. Howard is the director of Petite Plaisance, the former home of Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, and is the author of From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar. She divides her time between Augusta and Northeast Harbor, Maine.

Grace Frick introduced English-language readers all over the world to the distinguished French author Marguerite Yourcenar with her award-winning translation of Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian in 1954. European biographies of Yourcenar have often disparaged Frick and her relationship with Yourcenar, however. This work shows Frick as a person of substance in her own right, and paints a portrait of both women that is at once intimate and scrupulously documented. It contains a great deal of new information that will disrupt long-held beliefs about Yourcenar and may even shock some of her scholars and fans.