May Sarton



May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (3 May 1912 – 16 July 1995), an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.

Life
Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium. Her parents were science historian George Sarton and his wife, the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. In 1915, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. She went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and started theatre lessons in her late teens.

In 1945 she met her partner for the next thirteen years, Judy Matlack, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They separated in 1956, when Sarton's father died and Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire. Honey in the Hive (1988) is about their relationship. In her memoir At Seventy, she reflected on how her Unitarian Universalist upbringing shaped her.

Sarton later moved to York, Maine. She died of breast cancer on 16 July 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.

Writing
Despite the quality of some of her many novels and poems, May Sarton's best and most enduring work lies undoubtedly in her journals and memoirs, particularly Plant Dreaming Deep (about her early years at Nelson, ca. 1958-68), Journal of a Solitude (1972-1973, often considered her best), The House by the Sea (1974-1976), Recovering (1978-1979) and ''At Seventy (1982-83). In these fragile, rambling and honest accounts of her solitary life, she deals with such issues as ageing, isolation, solitude, friendship, love and relationships, lesbianism, self-doubt, success and failure, envy, gratitude for life's simple pleasures, love of nature, spirituality and, importantly, the constant struggles of a creative life. Sarton's later journals are not of the same quality, as she endeavoured to keep writing through ill health and often with the help of a tape recorder.

May Sarton often emphasized in her journals that she didn't see herself as a "lesbian" writer, but wanted to touch on what is universally human about love in all its manifestations. When publishing her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing in 1965, she feared that writing openly about lesbianism would lead to a diminution of the previously established value of her work. "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing," she wrote in Journal of a Solitude, "to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality ..." (Journal of a Solitude, 1973, pp. 90-91).

Margot Peters' controversial biography (1998) revealed May Sarton as a complex human being who often struggled in her interpersonal relationships.

Poetry

 * Encounter in April (1937)
 * Inner Landscape
 * The Lion and the Rose
 * The Land of Silence
 * In Time Like Air
 * Cloud, Stone,  Sun,  Vine
 * A Private Mythology
 * As Does New Hampshire
 * A Grain of Mustard Seed
 * A Durable Fire
 * Collected Poems, 1930-1973
 * Selected Poems of May Sarton (edited by Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Brynes)
 * Halfway to Silence
 * Letters from Maine
 * Coming Into Eighty (1994) Winner of the Levinson Prize
 * May Sarton's Well (edited by Edith Royce Schade)

Novels

 * The Single Hound
 * The Bridge of Years
 * Shadow of a Man
 * A Shower of Summer Days
 * Faithful are the Wounds
 * The Birth of a Grandfather (1957)
 * The Fur Person
 * The Small Room (1961)
 * Joanna and Ulysses
 * Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
 * Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare
 * The Poet and the Donkey
 * Kinds of Love
 * As We Are Now
 * Crucial Conversations (1975)
 * A Reckoning
 * Anger
 * The Magnificent Spinster
 * The Education of Harriet Hatfield
 * The Poet And The Donkey
 * The Return of Corporal Greene

Nonfiction

 * I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography
 * Plant Dreaming Deep
 * Journal of a Solitude
 * A World of Light
 * The House by the Sea
 * Recovering: A Journal
 * At Seventy: A Journal
 * Writings on Writings
 * After the Stroke
 * May Sarton: A Self-Portrait
 * Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year
 * At Eighty-Two

Children's books

 * Punch's Secret
 * ''A Walk Through the Woods'
 * "Who is Eva From As We Are Now?"