Born June 5-8: Yourcenar, Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Orman

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 710 people have been elected “immortals,” four of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar was a consummate woman of letters, writing novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. Some critics consider it the best historical novel ever written. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools staffed by closeted lesbians (More Women Than Men, 1933) or gay men (Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949). As ever, her method is to inform the reader indirectly, so nothing is any more overt here than in the rest of her work.

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream. She does not invest in the stock market. In 2007 she came out in a New York Times interview, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. In 2008 and 2009, she was named one of the Time 100, and in 2010 she was one of Forbes' most powerful women in the world. Last September she married her longtime partner and co-producer of her show, Kathy Travis, in a ceremony in South Africa. Now, she's 60.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.