A short life of the author
May Sarton (3 May 1912 – 16 July 1995) was a Belgian-born American poet, novelist, and memoirist who published over fifty books across a career spanning six decades — including seventeen novels, seventeen volumes of poetry, and fifteen journals and memoirs — and who became, particularly in the last third of her life, one of the most cherished American writers among readers who valued emotional honesty, solitude, and the examined interior life. Her journals, especially Journal of a Solitude (1973) and At Seventy (1984), are among the finest examples of the American journal tradition.
Life
Sarton was born Eleanore Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium. Her family fled the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 and eventually settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father, George Sarton, became a pioneering historian of science at Harvard. She was educated at the Shady Hill School and the Cambridge High and Latin School but did not attend college, choosing instead to join Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York at age seventeen.
She founded her own theatre company in the 1930s, but it failed during the Depression, and she turned to writing. Her first poetry collection, Encounter in April (1937), was followed by her first novel, The Single Hound (1938). She taught at various colleges, including Wellesley and Harvard, and spent extended periods in Europe, particularly in England and Belgium.
In 1958, she moved to Nelson, New Hampshire, and in 1973 to York, Maine, where she lived on the coast — the setting for The House by the Sea — until her death. She never married and lived alone for most of her adult life, a choice that became both the subject and the condition of her best work.
The Journals
Sarton’s journals are her most enduring achievement. Journal of a Solitude (1973) — written as a corrective to the more optimistic Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), which she felt had presented too serene a picture of her life — is a frank, sometimes painful account of depression, loneliness, creative struggle, and the effort to sustain a life of art without institutional support or a partner. It is one of the essential American books about solitude and the creative life.
The House by the Sea (1977) continues the journal from York, Maine, and is more peaceful — the sea provides a steadying rhythm. At Seventy (1984) chronicles her seventieth year with reflections on aging, friendship, and the unexpected fame that came to her late in life. After the Stroke (1988) and Encore (1993) document illness and diminishment with unflinching honesty.
The Novels
Sarton published seventeen novels, of which the most important is Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), a novel about an aging woman poet who is interviewed about her life and work and reflects on the creative process and on the lesbian loves that inspired her poetry. The novel was one of the first American literary novels to treat lesbianism openly and sympathetically, and its publication cost Sarton academic positions (she was dropped from consideration at several colleges).
Other notable novels include Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), based on the suicide of the Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen, and The Small Room (1961), a campus novel about academic life and the ethics of teaching.
Poetry
Sarton published seventeen volumes of poetry over six decades. Her poetry is formal, lyric, and accessible — closer to Robert Frost and Louise Bogan than to the experimental tradition. She wrote sonnets, elegies, and meditative lyrics about gardens, friendship, aging, and the natural world. Her poetry was largely ignored by academic critics during the period of confessional and postmodern experimentation, but it found a devoted general readership.
Critical Standing
Sarton occupies an unusual position in American letters: widely read, deeply loved by her audience, and almost entirely ignored by the literary establishment. She was never reviewed in the New York Review of Books, never won a major literary prize, and was excluded from most academic canons and anthologies. This neglect was partly the result of literary fashion — her work was too traditional for postmodernism, too personal for the New Critics — and partly the result of homophobia.
Since her death, her journals have been increasingly recognised as significant works. Journal of a Solitude in particular has become a touchstone text for writers, artists, and anyone interested in the relationship between solitude and creativity.
Collecting Sarton
Encounter in April (1937, Houghton Mifflin) in first edition brings $100–$300. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) brings $50–$150. Her journals are widely available and modestly priced. Signed copies appear regularly; Sarton was generous with inscriptions, particularly to the devoted readers who wrote to her throughout her life.