Memoirs of Hadrian

I really think of this as two books: there's the novel itself, a beautiful, thoughtful channeling of the great late-Roman emperor that is graced by an elegant, regal reticence and one of the rare powerful-but-admirable main characters in literature, and then there's Yourcenar's twenty-page afterword, "Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian," which is one of my very favorite pieces of writing from any time or anywhere, a romance of passion and patience between author and subject that distills Yourcenar's thirty-year struggle, through war and exile, to write the book you hold before you.