May Sarton

Here she found the peace and aloneness she sought—and partly feared. The journal records the renewing of her life and work in this place.

"I had always imagined a philosophical journal of my seventy-ninth year, dealing with the joys and problems, the doors opening out from old age to unknown efforts and surprises. I looked forward to the year as a potent harvest," May Sarton writes. Assailed by debilitating illnesses, Sarton found herself instead using much of her energy battling for health. Yet, as this record shows, she did after all do what she had wanted to, as she persevered in work, friendships, and love of nature, discovering in the process new landscapes in the country of old age.

Sarton's memoir begins with her roots in a Belgian childhood and describes her youth and education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her coming-of-age years, and the people who influenced her life as a writer.

So begins May Sarton's evocative early novel about Violet Gordon's return, after thirty years, to her childhood home, where much had to be settled in one brief summer—fateful decisions about a marriage, a love affair, and a career. No influence was more important than the splendid old Dene's Court itself, and the memories it held.

Sarton writes perceptively of how age affects her: the way small things take longer and tire more, what it feels like to endure pain and to be afraid. Other days her energy returns, her spirits lift, and projects abound. Readers both new and old will cherish this latest dispatch from her ongoing journey.

Reed and Poppy Whitelaw's conventional and apparently serene life together is shattered when Poppy tells Reed that she has decided to leave him. In a series of encounters that follow the shock of this news, which affects not only Reed but also their children and friends—in particular Philip, who must learn why he is so invested in their marriage—Reed and Poppy struggle to make sense of their lives in this alien new terrain.

Christina Chapman and her husband Cornelius, both past seventy, are "summer people"--people who come to rural New England for the summer months and go home to the city when the cold weather comes. This year, however, Christina and Cornelius have decided to stay on. May Sarton's Willard is a small town in the rocky hills of New Hampshire, a place that attracts "the untameable, the wild, the gentle." As Sarton takes us into the lives of the people who live there, we encounter a rich tapestry of characters and relationships. In the center are the deep, prickly friendship between Christina, an old Bostonian, and Ellen, the daughter of a farmer, and the unfolding process by which Christina and her husband "come into their own" in their marriage and become winter people at last.

May Sarton—poet, novelist, and chronicler—occupies a special place in American letters. This new journal chronicles the year that began on May 3, 1982, her seventieth birthday. At her home in Maine, she savors “the experience of being alive in this beautiful place,” reflecting on nature, friends, and work. “Why is it good to be old?” she was asked at one of her lectures. “Because,” she said, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”

Lucid, ardent, and contemplative, May Sarton is one of America's best-loved writers. This comprehensive collection - the first in twenty years - celebrates six decades of bold imagination and fifteen books of poetry, the creative output of a lifetime. Arranged chronologically, these poems reveal the full breadth of Sarton's creative vision. Themes include the search for an inward order, her passions, the natural world, self-knowledge, and, in her latest poems, the trials of old age. Moving through Sarton's work, we see her at ease in both traditional forms and free verse, finding inspiration in snow over a dark sea, a cat's footfall on the stairs, an unexpected love affair. Here is the creative process itself, its sources, demands, and joys - a handbook of the modern poetic psyche.

Harriet Hatfield begins a new life at the age of 60 after her lover of 30 years has died and left her comfortably well off. But when Harriet opens a bookstore for women in a blue-collar neighborhood of Boston, she is viciously attacked for her lesbianism. Ms. Sarton's powerful portrayal of the shy, reserved woman's battle becomes a moving statement about the place of the outsider in our world and the necessity of following the human heart. Dallas Morning News"

May Sarton's ninth novel explores a woman's struggle to reconcile the claims of life and art, to transmute passion and pain into poetry. As it opens, Hilary Stevens, a renowned poet in her seventies, is talking with Mar, an intense young man who has sought her out and whose passionate despair reminds her of herself when young. Mar has had an unhappy love affair with a man. Bewildered by both his sexuality and his writing talent, he flings his anguish against Hilary's brusque, sympathetic intelligence.

So begins May Sarton's short, swift blow of a novel, about the powerlessness of the old and the rage it can bring. As We Are Now tells the story of Caroline Spencer, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher, mentally strong but physically frail, who has been moved by relatives into a "home." Subjected to subtle humiliations and petty cruelties, sustained for too short a time by the love of another person, she fights back with all she has, and in a powerful climax wins a terrible victory.

The modern American author describes everyday experiences and conveys her feelings of frustration and anger over her attempts to write in solitude

This is the story of two poets, one an elderly Belgian woman known to the world as Jean Latour, the other a young Englishman. When Mark Taylor finds his life and art broken up by his love for an older, married woman, he turns for help to the poems of Jean Latour and finds the help he craves in the poet herself. In this early work we see the first flowering of May Sarton’s special ability to depict sensitive people who find they must travel new pathways if they are to discover their true selves.

With increasing candor and openness May Sarton's conversations have given an intimate view of her honest, courageous inner life. Best known to her many readers as a novelist and keeper of journals, Sarton sees herself pre-eminently as a poet. In the interviews collected here she speaks forthrightly about herself, her independence, and her writing. Although born in Belgium, Sarton is quintessentially American in her choice of solitude on which her personal well-being and writing depend. She is a modernist who has defined herself as an artist, with the occasionally painful recognition that all else must finally be subordinated to her writing. Her journal After the Stroke makes clear that when she cannot write she stands on the edge of the abyss of nonbeing. These interviews offer Sarton's readers the model of a woman who has supported herself as a writer of achievement, who has made her way without the comforts of academic tenure, grants, or bestseller listings.

Her works ranges from passionately honest diaries like Journal of a Solitude and novels with memorable characters like As We Are Now to superbly crafted lyrical poems and evocative descriptions of nature in poetry and prose.Here for the first time in an anthology of the best of May Sarton's novels, journals, and poetry. The editor, Bradford Dudley Daziel, is chairman of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Westbrook College in Portland, Maine.

“Her complex ideas are born into verse with the easy, simple beauty that is typical of her stunning lyric style.”—Boston Globe

The author chronicles her efforts to regain her health after having suffered a stroke at the age of seventy-three, describes her self-proclaimed life of solitude, and offers keen observations on the natural world surrounding her.

This is the story of the Wyeth family, set in Cambridge, Massachusetts (and in the summer, Maine): the very old, who are looking back; Sprig and his wife Frances, who are finding their way in the midst of youthful hopes that refuse to fade away; and the young, embarking on adulthood, sometimes with anger. As Sprig struggles to reach past his reserve so that he can be there for his wife and children, and for a friend who needs him, the other characters likewise find their way to what self-fulfillment means.

May Sarton's celebrations in this book center around the friendships that flowered in her life from age twenty-six to age forty-five—between the end of I Knew a Phoenix and the beginning of Plant Dreaming Deep. Her subjects include her father, the noted science historian George Sarton; people in the arts—Elizabeth Bowen, Louise Brogan, Jean Dominique; and people who lived lives remote from the center—Marc, the vigneron of Satigny, in the foothills of the Jura mountains, and Quig, the painter of Nelson, New Hampshire.