May Sarton

After her lover of thirty years dies, a Boston woman opens a bookstore for her neighborhood, an endeavor that forces her to confront her past while she rebuilds her future
Over the course of their thirty-year relationship, Vicky and Harriet fell into a predictable cadence: Vicky took the lead while Harriet was content to follow. When Vicky dies, Harriet is lost and in search of an identity that was subsumed by that of her partner for three...

May Sarton's celebrated novel of family, philosophy, and survival, set between the two great wars that cleaved Europe in two In the wake of the First World War, life for the Duchesnes goes on almost as it always has. Situated near a vegetable garden, an orchard, and rolling green pastures, their Belgian estate is one of the few that escaped dereliction in the difficult preceding years.   The garden is Mélanie Duchesne's lifeblood-a boost to her...

In this poignant and poetic novel, looking back on her sixty years, a dying woman examines the great relationships of her life  When she learns that she is dying, Laura Spelman vows to spend her final year only on what matters most. As she quickly realizes, this means coming to terms with her most fruitful and important bonds-her "real connections"-all of which have been with women. From her tempestuous daughter and beloved aunt, to a promising lesbian...

A Harvard grad student falls in love with an older woman in this beautifully written novel set in Paris Francis Chabrier is a 26-year-old graduate student still looking for direction when his mother dies. The reverberations of her sudden demise are deeply felt within her family circle and in the lives of her friends. Francis's stepfather, Alan, is devastated-but Francis only feels angry and adrift. Everyone expects him to marry his childhood friend...

May Sarton discovers the liberation of old age in this life-affirming journal On the second day of her 80th year, May Sarton began a new journal. She wrote it because she wanted "to go on a little while longer;" to discover "what is really happening to me."   This triumphant sequel to Endgame-Sarton's journal of her 79th year-is filled with the comforting minutiae of daily life, from gardening to planning dinners and floral arrangements to answering...

May Sarton confronts the pleasures and compromises of old age in this deeply moving memoir completed a few months before she died In this poignant and fearless account, Sarton chronicles the struggles of life at eighty-two. She juxtaposes the quotidian details of life-battling a leaky roof, sharing an afternoon nap with her cat, the joy of buying a new mattress-with lyrical musings about work, celebrity, devoted friends, and the limitations wrought...

A powerful and beautiful novella of one woman, consigned to a dreary retirement home, who wages a defiant battle against the dulling forces around her After seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer suffers a heart attack, her family sends her to a private retirement home to wait out the rest of her days. Her memory growing fuzzy, Caro decides to keep a journal to document the daily goings-on-her feelings of confinement and boredom; her distrust of the home's...

To their close friend Philip, Poppy and Reed Whitelaw's marriage appears stable and happy. Their ritual Sunday tennis matches and dinners are a highlight of his week, and the Whitelaws' repartee is an object of wonder and admiration. But beneath the surface, the marriage has slowly been unraveling for years. An artist, Poppy feels the weight of time, calculating that she has twenty good years left for her work and little remaining tolerance for her...

A beautifully organized collection of a poet's works in homage to nature One of the primary themes of May Sarton's work, especially in the first few decades of her career as a poet, memoirist, and novelist, is a veneration for and desire to understand nature. This yearning is collected in Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine, which comprises more than two decades of Sarton's impressive output.   The anthology marks a turning point in Sarton's career as her meditations...

A comprehensive volume collecting May Sarton's poetry from over sixty years of work. This collection spanning six decades exposes the charm and clarity of Sarton's poetry to the fullest. Arranged in chronological order, it follows the transformation of her writing through a wide range of poetic forms and styles. Her poetry meditates on topics including the American landscape, aging, nature, the act of creating art, and self-study. This compendium...