Detailed item info | Synopsis | A biography of May Sarton, the poet, novelist, and memoirist, who inspired passionate devotion in her fans. Her tumultuous life is documented in great detail, along with 97 photos of Sarton and her many lovers.
| | Size | | Length: | 474 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in. | | Width: | 7.0 in. | | Thickness: | 1.5 in. | | Weight: | 31.2 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | A brilliant portrait of one of America's major literary figures. Through her spiritual journals, May Sarton created the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that contradicted the reality of her loneliness, neediness, and isolation as she pushed away loved ones with her demands and betrayals. 97 photos.
The first biography of May Sarton: a brilliant revelation of the life and work of a literary figure who influenced her thousands of readers not only by her novels and poetry, but by her life and her writings about it.May Sartons career stretched from 1930 (early sonnets published in Poetry magazine) to 1995 (her journal At Eighty-Two). She wrote more than twenty novels, and twenty-five books of poems and journals. The acclaimed biographer Margot Peters was given full access to Sartons letters, journals, and notes, and during five years of research came to know Sarton herself--the complex woman and artist. She gives us a compelling portrait of Sarton the actress, the poet, the novelist, the feminist, the writer who struggled for literary acceptance. She shows us, beneath Sartons exhilarating, irresistible spirit, the needy courtier and seducer, the woman whose creativity was propelled by the psychic drama she created in others.We watch young May at age two as she is abruptly uprooted from her native Belgium by World War I, a child ignored both by her mother, who was intent on her own artistic vision and reluctant to cope with a child, and by her father, obsessed with his academic research.We see Sarton as a young girl in America, and then later, at nineteen, choosing a life in the theatre, landing a job in Eva Le Galliennes Civic Repertory, and gathering what would become a tight-knit coterie of friends and lovers . . . Sarton beginning to write poetry and novels . . . Sarton making friends with Elizabeth Bowen and Julian Huxley, Erika and Klaus Mann, Virginia Woolf, the poet H.D.--charming and enlisting them with her work, her vitality, her hunger for love, driven by her need to conquer (among her conquests: Bowen, Huxley, and later his wife, Juliette). We see her intense friendships with literary pals, including Muriel Rukeyser (her lover), and Louise Bogan, Sarton's "literary sibling, who at once encouraged her and excluded her from a world in which Bogan was a central figure. We see Sarton begin to create in the spiritual journals that inspired the devotion of readers the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that contradicted the reality of her neediness, loneliness, and isolation as she pushed away loved ones with her demands and betrayals.A fascinating portrait of one of our major literary figures--a book that for the first time reveals the life that she herself kept hidden.
| | Industry reviews | "Margot Peters is a well-organized biographer, giving us the life in short sections as if to relieve us from the sheer exhaustion of all the detail. Her writing is clear and readable, and her descriptions and critiques of Sarton's work seem fair....But this book is also interesting as a portrait of the times."
Washington Post Book World - Linda Pastan (02/23/1997)
"According to Ms. peters, the May Sarton devotees saw as 'courageous, independent, in harmony with nature, warm, loving, frank about her shortcomings' was in fact a pill of the first water. People who had the misfortune to become her intimates almost universally came to regret it."
New York Times Book Review - Angeline Goreau (04/06/1997)
"Peters is...measured and fair....Peters's account is careful and compassionate. May Sarton's published work and her life, considered together, provide the synthesis and significance that proved so elusive during her lifetime."
Nation - Martha Gordon (06/30/1997)
"The authorized but unquestionably 'warts and all' biography of the late poet, novelist, and diarist....A thoughtful, even-handed, well-written story of the tumultuous life of a woman who might have left an even stronger literary legacy if she had lived life less ardently."
Acocella
"This is the first biography of Sarton (1912-1995), the prolific author of a stream of unrelentingly minor poems, novels, and journals....Peters shows with devastating precision that, contrary to the wise-woman persona Sarton cultivated in old age..., she was often monstrously selfish, hurtful to those who loved her, and a sexual predator who wouldn't take no for an answer."
Holland
"Engrossing....Peters' dishy biography should go a long way toward enhancing Sarton's literary reputation."
Craven
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