MAY SARTON: Biography - Softcover

Peters, Margot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449907988 ISBN 13: 9780449907986

Publisher: Random House, Inc., 2008

Synopsis

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 Sarton's 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 Sarton's 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 Sarton's 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 Gallienne's 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, drivenby 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Margot Peters has been Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and holds a Ph.D. in Victorian literature. She is the author of Charlotte Brontė Style in the Novel, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontė, Bernard Shaw and the Actresses, The House of Barrymore, and Mrs. Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She lives in Lake Mills, Wisconsin.

From the Inside Flap:

From acclaimed writer Margot Peters comes the first, completely authorized biography of novelist, poet, and feminist May Sarton. Granted unprecedented access to personal papers and diaries, Peters gives us a compelling look at the woman who influenced a legion of readers with rich and intimate writings, and reveals the fascinating life that Sarton herself kept hidden.
Beginning with a young Sarton largely ignored by her parents, Peters traces the compulsive quest for recognition and artistic inspiration that would characterize most of Sarton's life. We witness her at nineteen as she chooses a life in the theater, only to discover later her real passion: writing. As her literary career takes shape, we watch her personal and professional struggles for acceptance, her intense relationships with such learned friends as Muriel Rukeyser and Louise Bogan, and her secret turmoil over her sexuality. But ultimately, we see Sarton begin to create in her works the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that often contradicted the reality of her life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House, Inc.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0449907988
• ISBN 13: 9780449907986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496