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Great Lives from History: American Women

May Sarton

by Richard Klin

Novelist, poet, lecturer, essayist

During the course of fifty years, May Sarton carved out a prolific, distinct literary niche in many different forms, equally comfortable with prose or poetry. One of the first openly gay women writers, she became a feminist and lesbian icon.

Born: May 3, 1912; Wondelgem, Belgium

Died: July 16, 1995; York, Maine

Area of Achievement: Literature, gay and lesbian issues, women's rights

Early Life

May Sarton was born in 1912 in Belgium to a Belgian father and British mother. Two years later World War I began and soon Belgium was under German occupation. Sarton's father was a prominent scientific scholar and publisher; the family was fortunate enough to make their way to the United States and escape the rest of the war, eventually settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the rest of her life, May Sarton traveled back and forth between the United States and Europe, feeling at home in both the Old World and New.

The gifted May Sarton attended high school at the rigorous Cambridge High and Latin, where she displayed a passion for both poetry and the stage. In 1930—while still in her late teens—her work made it into the prestigious Poetry literary journal. At the time, though, her theatrical ambitions held sway and after graduating from high school she made the trek to New York City, the beacon for anyone who aspired to the stage. However her interest in poetry never fully waned, and in 1937 Sarton published Encounter in April, a collection of poems.

May Sarton was a lesbian—a complicating factor in her artistic and personal life. Outside of small, isolated circles, lesbianism was stigmatized in the 1930s. A 1931 trip to Paris proved liberating, since Paris had a more open, tolerant attitude and a more assertive, vibrant gay culture than the United States at the time.

Life's Work

From the beginning, Sarton's writing defied easy categorization, which was to her credit. She was a hybrid: part-American, part-European, and her art reflected this dual positioning. She had no desire to confine her writing to a distinct school of poetry. The effect, though, was that she was difficult to slot, which made critical and public attention harder to generate. In the late 1930s she turned her attention to novel writing, publishing The Single Houndin 1938, which received a favorable review in The New York Times.

Sarton's subsequent literary career was enviable in many ways: herpoetry appeared in the pages of prestigious publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Saturday Review. Critical acceptance, however, was slow in coming. The Bridge of Years, a novel published shortly after the end of World War II, attracted favorable reviews but sold poorly. That early positive review in The New York Times proved to be a fluke. To her great chagrin, Sarton operated under the critical radar and paid a price for her eclecticism; the literary world did not know quite what to make of her. “Sometimes the demon of doubt comes to tell me that I've been fatally divided between two crafts, that of the novel and that of poetry,” she stated in an interview for the Paris Review in 1983, “but I've always believed that in the end it was the total work which would communicate a vision of life and it really needs different modes to do that.” Sarton also faced the entrenched sexism of mostly male critics, disinclined to favor her female protagonists and introspective themes.

Perhaps to compensate for her lack of critical success, for much of the postwar 1940s and the 1950s Sarton undertook a grueling life of visiting colleges across the country for lectures, talks, and writing tutorials for small groups of students. Her theater background and natural grace made her a riveting, commanding figure. A network of fans and acolytes—many of them lesbian—began to grow.

May Sarton was a disciplined writer. She made it a practice to rise in the early morning and write for hours. Endlessly prolific, her lifetime output totaled 13 memoirs and journals, 19 novels, and 15 books of poetry. To an extent, though, she was too prolific. What endeared her to her increasingly devoted readership did not generate the respect of the literary establishment, a respect that continued to elude her. It was not just sexism: her body of work had flaws. Even a sympathetic observer such as her biographer, Margot Peters, wrote that a “Sarton novel has certain predictable features. The characters are drawn from her social experience, which ranges from schoolteachers who talk beautifully and drink dry martinis to wealthy easterners who also talk beautifully and drink dry martinis…” Her novel The Fur Person (1957), for example, features a cat as a protagonist. This was not a recipe for inclusion in the literary academy.

The tumult and social ferment of the 1960s finally pushed May Sarton to the fore of the literary world. Before the 1960s gay themes in literature—if explored at all—were expressed in a code or allusion. Courageously, her mid-sixties novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) featured an openly lesbian protagonist. This lesbian protagonist, as Sarton reiterated in Journal of a Solitude, was emphatically “not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive… [she] is neither pitiable or disgusting…” Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was a bold attempt “to say radical things gently so that they may penetrate without shock.” And then Sarton went public with her own sexuality.

Within a few years the feminist movement and the fight for gay liberation had taken root and suddenly May Sarton was considered a feminist and lesbian pioneer. Her relentless individualism—her refusal to be pigeonholed, the lack of respect she received from the mostly male literary establishment—began to engender respectful attention from a larger public. Sarton was one of the early forerunners of the do-it-yourself ethos: Her tireless visits to colleges and universities cultivated her own literary constituency. In the 1970s she became sufficiently well-known to appear on television in Women Alone, a Barbara Walters special.

As May Sarton grew older, she increasingly turned her attention to journal writing, beginning with Journal of a Solitude in 1973. She dealt frankly with her struggles with depression, the travails of aging, and the lack of critical acclaim. In 1993, for example, she penned a candid journal entry that dealt with yet another bad review of her writing: “I have thought a lot… about what it is about a bad review, why it is so hard to take…. But the effect of a bad review is very much like being physically bruised. Somebody socks you in the breast, and you know it is not fatal, that you are not going to die of it… but the bruise hurts.” (At Eighty-Two) Not many writers make that sort of admission. Sarton, now in her eighties, also expressed in these journal entries a strong vein of spirituality, which attracted attention from a broader community.

May Sarton suffered a stroke in 1988 and her health began to deteriorate. She continued writing up until her death in 1995.

Significance

May Sarton was a prolific feminist and lesbian writer who burdened by never fully receiving what she considered her critical due. Yet she hewed to her own artistic vision and made significant inroads as a poet, prose writer, essayist, and diarist—an uncommonly eclectic literary range. In her lifetime, she became an enduring icon to the feminist and lesbian communities.

Out and Proud

Gay writers and gay literature, circa 1965, were not entirely an unknown commodity. Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal, for example, were openly gay, but largely, gay literature was relegated to either the world of pulp writing or a closeted existence, existing via an underground circuit. May Sarton and her growing fan base in the 1940s and 1950s kept their sexual orientation hidden, as befitted an outlawed minority.

On the surface, May Sarton was an unlikely feminist and lesbian icon, especially during the 1960s. Her writing regimen included listening to Mozart and Haydn. Sarton had no real affinity for the more radical variants of women's and gay liberation that were beginning to make themselves known in the late 1960s, nor was she ever fully comfortable with her designation as “lesbian writer.”

But May Sarton altered the equation. She was gay, she declared to the world, and her writing reflected her sexual orientation. In the years to come, as the stigmas against homosexuality began to crumble, gay life could be written about and discussed openly. Women—gay and straight—could now write about their own lives and concerns. Sarton was a pioneer.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Klin, Richard. "May Sarton." Great Lives from History: American Women, edited by Mary K. Trigg, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLHW_0437.

APA 7th

Klin, R. (2016). May Sarton. In M. K. Trigg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Women. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Klin, Richard. "May Sarton." Edited by Mary K. Trigg. Great Lives from History: American Women. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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