May Sarton

Eleanore Marie Sarton, known professionally as May Sarton, was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, then a separate municipality and today part of the city of Ghent. The only child of historian of science George Sarton and English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes, she died on July 16, 1995, of breast cancer and is buried in Nelson Cemetery in Nelson, New Hampshire.

When Germany invaded Belgium during World War I, the Sarton family fled first to Ipswich, England, where Sarton's maternal grandmother resided, and then relocated to Boston, where her father joined the faculty at Harvard University. Sarton attended school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, graduating from Cambridge Latin High School in 1929. Although she won a scholarship to Vassar College, a performance by Eva Le Gallienne in The Cradle Song drew her toward the stage instead. She joined Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City, working there as an apprentice. Her Broadway career included an appearance in Romeo and Juliet in 1930. Throughout her theatrical training, she continued writing poetry, and in December 1930, at seventeen, she published a series of sonnets, some of which later appeared in her first published poetry collection, Encounter in April, in 1937.

At nineteen, Sarton traveled to Europe and spent a year in Paris, during which she encountered Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Julian Huxley, Juliette Huxley, Lugné-Poe, Basil de Sélincourt, and S. S. Koteliansky. She had affairs with both of the Huxleys during this period. Her first novel, The Single Hound, was published in 1938. In 1945, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she met Judith Matlack, born September 9, 1898, who became her partner for the following thirteen years. They separated in 1956, the same year Sarton's father died and Sarton relocated to Nelson, New Hampshire. Their relationship is the subject of Sarton's 1988 book Honey in the Hive. In 1958, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Over the course of her career, Sarton produced 53 books, comprising 19 novels, 17 collections of poetry, 15 nonfiction works, 2 children's books, a play, and additional screenplays. She later moved to York, Maine. In 1990, a stroke temporarily debilitated her, and because writing had become difficult, she used a tape recorder to produce her journal Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, published in 1992. The following year brought Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year and the Levinson Prize for Poetry, both in 1993. Her final book, Coming Into Eighty, published posthumously in 1995, covers the period from July 1993 to August 1994.

Critics associated with the Poetry Foundation have characterized Sarton's style as calm, cultured, and urbane. Her journals and memoirs are widely regarded as her most enduring work, among them Plant Dreaming Deep, Journal of a Solitude, The House by the Sea, Recovering, and At Seventy. These works address aging, solitude, friendship, love, lesbianism, spirituality, and the demands of a creative life. When her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing appeared in 1965, Sarton acknowledged that writing openly about lesbianism required courage, and she expressed concern that the subject matter might diminish the reception of her earlier work. Following the novel's release, her writing began to be taught in university-level women's studies courses. Although her work contains vivid erotic female imagery, Sarton resisted the label of lesbian writer, stating that her vision of life was not limited to one segment of humanity and had little to do with sexual proclivity. An authorized biography by Margot Peters was published in 1998, and a selected edition of Sarton's letters, edited by Susan Sherman, appeared in 1997. Many of Sarton's papers are held at the New York Public Library.