{"id":329,"date":"2004-03-23T10:04:06","date_gmt":"2004-03-23T18:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/03\/23\/may-sarton-the-indomitable-writer\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:18:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:18:36","slug":"may-sarton-the-indomitable-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/03\/23\/may-sarton-the-indomitable-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"May Sarton: The Indomitable Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite authors is not extremely well-known, though she is well-read in feminist and lesbian circles. Two years ago I read May Sarton: A Biography<\/A>, by Margot Peters. In Sarton’s novels, the reader is infused with a sense of healing — there is a tenderness in her handling of complex human issues. She wrote about growth, love, transformation. She expressed herself poetically. Even her journals — raw, at times — can be exquisite in their detail and insight. However, the biography revealed her to be needy, verbally abusive, impulsive, arrogant, intense, rageful, and, I suspect, bipolar. Did that dismay me? No, actually not. For as unattractively as she could behave, her work stands on its own. The critics never gave her the due she desired and, I think, deserved. She also wanted to be a poet, and this is what she considered herself primarily to be. She wrote novels and taught to put a roof over her head (with the help of family money).<\/p>\n

Sarton was revealed to me as a fragile, broken person through whom beauty emerged. Isn’t that what we all are, and what we aspire to do? <\/p>\n

I Googled around and found lots of bibliographies (not an extensive search, mind you) but all listed the work alphabetically. I read May Sarton’s book about a cat as a teenager, and then I worked my way through her oeuvre<\/a>, reading her recent novels; only later could I get ahold of her first works. I think it’s important to read an author chronologically to experience their development. There’s a lot more of Sarton remaining for me to read; I have only read one journal and a book of poems. She was prolific. When she died at age 83, she had published 53 books. What follows is a selected bibliography based on what I scouted on the net. A brief biography can be read here<\/a>.
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\nNovels<\/b> (in order of publication):<\/p>\n