May Sarton

May Sarton was the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton, a Belgian and American novelist, poet, and memoirist born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, today part of Ghent. She was the only child of George Sarton, a historian of science, and Mabel Eleanor Elwes, an English artist. World War I shaped her earliest years. When Germany invaded Belgium, the family fled to Ipswich, England, where her maternal grandmother lived. A year later they moved to Boston, where her father began working at Harvard University.

Sarton grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Cambridge Latin High School in 1929. In her late teens she took theater lessons while continuing to write poetry, a double pull that marked her early life. She won a scholarship to Vassar College, but after seeing Eva Le Gallienne perform in The Cradle Song, she chose the stage instead. She joined Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City and worked there for a year as an apprentice. Even then, poetry remained central. At seventeen, she published a series of sonnets, some of which later appeared in her first poetry volume, Encounter in April (1937).

At nineteen, Sarton went to Europe and lived in Paris for a year. There she met writers and cultural figures including Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Julian Huxley and Juliette Huxley, Lugné-Poe, Basil de Sélincourt, and S. S. Koteliansky. In that setting she published her first novel, The Single Hound (1938). Over her career she wrote 53 books: 19 novels, 17 books of poetry, 15 nonfiction works, 2 children’s books, a play, and additional screenplays. Critics described her style as “calm, cultured, and urbane,” and much of her writing kept a politically conscious lens.

Sarton’s journals and memoirs became some of her most studied work. These include Plant Dreaming Deep, about her early years in Nelson, New Hampshire; Journal of a Solitude; The House by the Sea; Recovering; and At Seventy. In them she wrote frankly about aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, love and relationships, lesbianism, self-doubt, success and failure, envy, gratitude for simple pleasures, nature, flowers, the changing seasons, spirituality, and the struggle of creative work. In 1965, with Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, she wrote openly about lesbianism at a time when it was highly unusual to do so. She later said she wanted her work to reach “what is universally human about love in all its manifestations.”

Her personal life also shaped her books. In 1945, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sarton met Judith “Judy” Matlack, who became her partner for thirteen years. They separated in 1956, the year Sarton's father died and Sarton moved to Nelson. Her book Honey in the Hive is about their relationship. Sarton was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. Later she lived in York, Maine. After a stroke in 1990 made writing difficult, she used a tape recorder to record and transcribe Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year. She followed it with Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year, won the Levinson Prize for Poetry in 1993, and published her final book, Coming Into Eighty, after her death.

May Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995, and is buried in Nelson Cemetery in Nelson, New Hampshire. Readers continue to turn to her because she wrote plainly about private life without making it small. Her pages make room for solitude, anger, gratitude, illness, love, age, and the daily work of making art. She did not present the self as simple. That honesty, sometimes restless and sometimes tender, is what keeps her voice close to the reader.