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May Sarton (1912 - 1995)
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 May
Sarton : A Biography by Margot Peters
Margot Peters had full
access to May
Sarton's letters, journals, and notes while she researched and
wrote this biography, and the result is a book that charts
Sarton's personal life as it explores her work as a poet,
novelist, and feminist. Peters carefully details Sarton's many
love affairs (mostly with women), portraying the writer as an
insensitive and self-absorbed lover who was prone to betrayal on
the slightest pretext. She attributes this behavior to Sarton's
precarious sense of self-worth, developed as a result of parental
neglect in her early childhood. That low self-esteem resonated in
Sarton's incessant fear--despite publishing 15 books of poetry, 19
novels, and 13 memoirs and journals--that her writing might not be
quite up to par. Peters draws this out and, unlike many literary
biographers, allows that her subject's writing could have been
better. Throughout the book, she points to Sarton's common use of
cliché and her tendency toward sentimentality. She suggests that
if Sarton had taken more care with her craft and had better
editors to guide her, she might have evolved into a better writer.
Ultimately, the blend of facts about Sarton's life and loves with
the critical analysis of her writing gives readers a comprehensive
view of this complex woman and artist.
 Dear Juliette - Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley
by May
Sarton, et al
The poet May Sarton's reputation took a nosedive
after her death in 1995 and the unflattering biography (by Margot
Peters) that followed. The publication of her tender, revealing
letters has managed to arrest this decline. Susan Sherman, who
edited Sarton's Selected Letters, 1916-1954, now offers
insight into Sarton's most profound and affecting romance, with
Juliette Huxley, the Swiss-born wife of the English scientist Sir
Julian Huxley. May and Juliette met in 1936, while May was
involved with Julian. Their love affair culminated in one
passionate week in Paris in 1948, after which--hurt by May's angry
threat that she would tell Julian--Juliette broke off the
relationship. After Julian Huxley's death in 1976, they began to
write one another again and kept in contact until Juliette's
death. As May Sarton wrote in old age, "I have had many
lovers, many friends since I was 25 and met Juliette Huxley, but
none has so nourished the poet and the lover as she did, the
incomparable one." The book includes drafts of introductions
by May Sarton and excerpts from a few of Juliette Huxley's
responses to Sarton. --Regina Marler
 Journal
of a Solitude by
May Sarton
May Sarton writes with keen observation of both
inner and outer worlds--a garden, the seasons, daily life in New
Hampshire, books, people, ideas--and throughout everything, her
spiritual and artistic journey. "An honorable confession of
the writer's faults, fears, sadnesses, and disappointments. . .
."--Cleveland Plain Dealer.
About the Author
A wonderfully prolific poet, novelist, memoirist, and
journal-writer, May Sarton has always enjoyed an extremely wide
and loyal readership. Though she considered poetry to be her
life's work, it was her novels and journals that made her famous. Plant
Dreaming Deep, a memoir published in 1968, tells the story of
her decision at forty-five years old to buy a house in a small New
Hampshire village and to live and write in it alone. Journal of
a Solitude (1973), the first of a series of journals about her
life in a different house on the Maine coast, brought her many new
readers-particularly women-who identified with her efforts to
carve out and describe a life of chosen solitude in all its
rewards and contrary vicissitudes.
Sarton's journals chronicle the dailiness of the
life of a woman artist. She struggles to establish a structure
whereby she can both protect the time for creativity and stay in
necessary touch with the world. The house must be orderly and
aesthetically pleasing, the garden bountiful and beautiful.
Animals provide companionship and demand care; music is both
solace and inspiration. The state of the world is exhilarating and
depressing. Friends and lovers are emotionally imperative and
emotionally draining. Visitors and fan letters enrich her days,
but solitude is necessary for the muse to appear. Though to her
sorrow, major critical acclaim is denied her, the continuing
expansion of her readership affirms her worth as a writer. She
fears her openness about her love for women may have cost her some
of that critical acclaim, but knows it is that very openness about
her emotional life-its highs and lows-that gives her readers hope
and encouragement. And as she grows older, Sarton does not shrink
from describing the miseries of old age, even as she continues to
find pleasure in the small things of life. It is Sarton's great
achievement in these journals that she shares with her readers
with such honesty and immediacy her joys and despairs, her
failures and triumphs.
Sarton was born in Belgium in May 1914, three
months before Germany invaded Belgium at the beginning of World
War I. Leaving everything behind, her family emigrated to America
when Sarton was four years old and settled in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Much of Sarton's writing reflects both her European
roots and her attachment to her New England upbringing. Instead of
going to college (a circumstance she considered "a great
piece of luck"), Sarton joined Eva Le Gallienne's Civic
Repertory Theatre as an actress at seventeen, and founded her own
theater company in the 1930s. She published sonnets in Poetry
magazine as a very young woman, and her first book of poems, Encounter
in April, was published in 1937. To support her writing,
Sarton for a time lectured at colleges, where her striking and
passionate personality gained her great success. Her first of many
novels, The Single Hound, was published in 1938, and she
continued to alternate publishing poetry and novels thereafter.
Until World War II, Sarton traveled to Europe every year, where
she met Virginia Woolf and became a friend of Elizabeth Bowen.
May Sarton is the author of seventeen books of
poetry, twenty novels, and ten memoirs and journals. She received
eighteen honorary degrees, and was elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. She died in 1995.
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by Lenora P. Blouin, Celebration of Women
Writers, University of Pennsylvania
Excerpt:
By this time Sarton's father had died and in
1958 she sold her parent's home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and
bought an old house in Nelson, New Hampshire, the subject of which
became the basis of her next memoir, Plant Dreaming Deep
(1968). It was only when she owned her own house and land in
Nelson that Sarton first came to feel more American than European.
Before the publication of this memoir, Sarton had published two
novels, The Small Room (1961) and Mrs. Stevens
Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965). Frequently referred to
as her "coming out novel," the latter was embraced not
only by "feminist" scholars but by Lesbians as well and
marked a turning point in Sarton scholarship; her work began to be
studied in colleges and universities, especially in Women's
Studies programs. Articles appeared in feminist journals and
books, and much would be written about this novel in the years to
come. For Sarton this posed a dilemma; she celebrated the serious
recognition her work was beginning to receive yet shunned the
label "lesbian writer" which she felt narrowly limited
the perception and focus of her work. She was and wanted to be
seen as a universal writer and had, in fact, already written many
novels about family and married life...
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de Grummond Collection, McCain
Library and Archives, University
Libraries, University of
Southern Mississippi
The collection is protected by the Copyright Law
of the United States (Title 17, U. S. Code). Reproductions can be
made only if they are to be used for "private study,
scholarship, or research." It is the user's responsibility to
verify copyright ownership and to obtain all necessary permissions
prior to the reproduction, publication, or other use of any
portion of these materials, other than that noted above.
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By Will Elliott, Associate Editor, poetrymagazine.com
Essayist, novelist, journal writer, feminist,
lesbian, and poet, May Sarton, was born in Wondelgem, Belgium, on
May 3, 1912. She was the only child of George and Mabel Sarton. In
1916, as the German war machine approached Belgium, the Sartons
immigrated to the United States, settling in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. There, Sarton’s father, an esteemed historian of
science, joined the faculty of Harvard University...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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