"May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters." -- May Sarton
May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (3 May 1912 — 16 July 1995), an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Many of her works reflect the lesbian experience.
"A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.""Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!""Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.""Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.""Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.""In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.""In the country of pain we are each alone.""It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!""Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.""Most people have to talk so they won't hear.""No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.""One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.""Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.""The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.""The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.""The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.""There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.""True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.""We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.""Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be."
Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium. Her parents were science historian George Sarton and his wife, the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. In 1915, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. She went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and started theatre lessons in her late teens.
In 1945 she met her partner for the next thirteen years, Judy Matlack, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They separated in 1956, when Sarton's father died and Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire. Honey in the Hive (1988) is about their relationship.
Sarton later moved to York, Maine. She died of breast cancer on 16 July 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.
Sarton's 1961 novel The Small Room was a meditation on teaching and a shrewd analysis of the price of excellence in women's education. Set in New England at the fictional all-women's Appleton College and loosely modeled on such schools as Radcliffe College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College, The Small Room focuses on the experience of a recently-hired faculty member, Lucy Winter, who discovers that Jane Seaman, a talented senior and protegee of a powerful faculty member, Professor Carryl Cope, plagiarized an essay by Simone Weil, "The Iliad: The Poem of Force," in an essay she published in the college literary magazine. Winter not only discovers the plagiarism, but she also insists that it was caused by Jane Seaman's ill mental health. Seaman stole the essay in order to meet the expectations placed on her by Professor Cope. To appease Cope and Olive Hunt, a wealthy trustee, the college buries the incident until the student government insists that Seaman be punished. In the meantime, Winters helps Seaman to find psychological help. Despite widespread belief that to yield to psychological explanations means to negate the role that character and personal responsibility play in one's actions, the faculty votes to remove Seaman from the school for one semester with the understanding that she may re-enroll after she spends time in a sanitorium.
A sub-theme of the book is the longstanding, intimate, and strongly implied lesbian relationship between Professor Cope and Olive Hunt. Hunt opposes the college's decision to hire a psychiatrist to serve the needs of such students as Jane Seaman and insists that she will donate her fortune to another college should Appleton move in that direction. The decision to hire a psychologist results in Hunt's ending her relationship with Cope. Seaman, moreover, also has an unusually close relationship with Professor Cope.
When Sarton published her more openly lesbian novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing in 1965, Sarton feared, rightly, that writing so openly about lesbianism would lead to a diminution of the previously established value of her work. "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing," she wrote in Journal of Solitude 1973, "to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality ..."{Journal of Solitude, 1973. Pg.90-91}
