In this book of letters, rich in description of life before, during, and after the war, Sarton's inner climate and varied landscape are revealed in fascinating detail. Readers find fertile ground for contemplation of who Sarton really was and why this friendship endured. *Dear Juliette* contains extraordinarily detailed notes researched by Susan Sherman who is knowledgeable about her subject from both personal and scholarly perspectives. Providing a palette of color and shading in emotional texture as well as factual background, Sherman's notes add tremendous depth to the story Sarton tells. The preface gives the reader insightful information about Sarton's complicated temperament and brings clarity and understanding to the canvas. This is Sarton at her best: with the transparency she so valued telling her readers about the most remarkable love of her life.....her dear Juliette.

From Erika Pfander Director of the Chamber Theatre of Maine; Director and Producer of May Sarton's only plays: "The Music Box Bird" and "The Underground River"

DEAR JULIETTE; LETTERS OF MAY SARTON TO JULIETTE HUXLEY

Readers of May Sarton-whose numbers are legion- must indeed be grateful for Susan Sherman, the gifted editor of this exquisite book. As official editor of Sarton's letters Ms. Sherman is undertaking the herculean task of compiling and editing Sarton's voluminous correspondences: it is clear from what she has given us in this richly rewarding volume(and,two previous volumes: May Sarton: AMONG THE USUAL DAYS and MAY SARTON; SELECTED LETTERS (1916-1954), that she is uniquely qualified for the task.

Sherman is a writer of grace,wisdom,and integrity-evidenced by her sensitive selection of letters and photographs, and her illuminating notes and preface. This volume is a gift to all Sarton's readers, for the letters let us hear Sarton's voice at every stage of her life. While the journals, which have moved and inspired so many-with their bracing honesty,intelligence,and keen observation of nature (human and otherwise)-are full of the richness and challenges of daily life in her middle and late years, their references to the past are memories.

Her letters, however, are those memories, as well as each day's life as it was lived, and they reveal her ardent, vibrant mind and sensitive spirit. Throughout her life she was a seeker of beauty,justice,and truth-and thus was vulnerable to(but not diminished by) heartache and disappointment. Her involvement with the Huxleys spanned the years 1936-1948; her deep love for, and abiding friendship with Juliette survived a 25 year silence,and when renewed-lasted until Juliette's death,a year before May's own death in 1995. What a delicate balance, that three-way relationship [Julian-May-Juliette]-and what a privilige to be given an intimate view of this remarkable friendship between two extraordinary women set against extraordinary times.

Susan Sherman, editor of Dear Juliette, was bequeathed the challenge of bringing to life Sarton's relationship with Juliette Huxley. Too frail and in ill health to complete the process of selecting and editing hundreds of letters and completing an introduction that would preface this story, Sarton asked Ms. Sherman to complete the work. As editor of previous volumes of Sarton's unpublished poems and letters, including May Sarton Among the Usual Days and May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916-1954, Ms. Sherman was well qualified to bring this project to fruition, the results of which are this monumental achievement presenting the immortalization of the "ethos of a love affair." In a letter written to Juliette in 1937 Sarton comments: "How difficult it is to love well - to know when it is better to be silent, that even joy can strain the heart so frightfully - though in general everything that denies life seems false to me." (63)* That comment sums up a great deal of Sarton's feelings about human relationships and would remain essentially the same throughout her life. She could not deny love, regardless of the pain, suffering, fear or misunderstanding that may develop. Sarton first met the Huxleys, Julian and Juliette, in 1936. This meeting would change her life forever. Ironically, she first shared a love affair with Julian Huxley, biologist and then Director of the London Zoo. It was through this affair that Sarton grew to realize her real passion was reserved for women, as she explained to Julian in a letter: ". . . there is a part of me perhaps the writing part that needs a woman as a man needs a woman. ... However much one loves there are things one can't do against one's own spirit." (70) It was the writing part of her, the poet, who fell in love with Juliette. Juliette became Sarton's muse as poetry flowed from her pen. "One of the great virtues [of poetry] is that power to say an apparently unsayable thing quite simply." (44) Yet this love, as intense and powerful as it was, was not destined to be fully reciprocated. Juliett's fear and misunderstanding eventually dictated a twenty-seven year separation which was only overcome upon the death of Julian Huxley in the mid 1970s. Eventually May Sarton and Juliette Huxley were reuinited, the circle of the ethos of their love affair was completed. The intervening years of silence had not destroyed the love Sarton held for Juliette, it had just tempered it. ". . . the pain is no longer acute; joy is no longer as intense as one looks back." (295) But the letters and poetry that were written around this passionate friendship remain and are a testament to its endurance. They underscore Sarton's presceint statement from 1948: "I would race through the years to meet you at the other end." (241) *page numbers are from the text of Dear Juliette Lenora P. Blouin Author: May Sarton: A Bibliography Scarecrow Press, 1978 Forthcoming: May Sarton: A Revised Bibliography Scarecrow Press, 2000

This was my introduction to May Sarton. I especially enjoyed the book for what I learned about her. This is both a gentle and passionate story.

Excellent prose. This was my introduction to May Sarton. I especially enjoyed the book for what I learned about her. This is both a gentle and passionate story.

This is Sarton's story of her quest for a home that will provide her with physical shelter and the space, solitude, and spiritual sustenance she requires to write. It is also the story of her search to bring all the various parts of her past - her parents and their European roots, precious physical keepsakes, and the spirits of those who had touched her life deeply - together under one roof.

Sarton finds what she was looking for in a run down old colonial house in the remote township of Nelson, New Hampshire. There she embarks on renovations and adjustments that profoundly change how she sees and lives her life.

For anyone who is interested in Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep offers a revealing look at the artist's inner procees. It also allows us to see her in the context of a community. Over the course of time, we are introduced her many and charismatic neighbors. There is Bessie Lyman who lived in Turkey and speaks Arabic, Quig the deepely introspective artist, and Mildred his distinguished wife, Newt who helps her with woodchucks, and Perley who helps her transform her land into a garden. And then there are the people who are not physically present who nevertheless seem as real to Sarton as her next door neighbors. Set against the backdrop of the New England seasons, and defined by the various events and crises that occur in her personal and professional lives, the writing is rich with experience and Sarton's own peculiar blend of poetics and matter-of-fact whimsy. This is a book that any fan of Sarton will enjoy.

May Sarton is not for everyone, and in this text she goes even deeper into the contemplative stillness that marks her work. She writes beautifully about her life and the living creatures (human, vegetative and otherwise) that fill it. For some strange reason I read this book for the first time as a teenager, and it was a great antidote to the hormone-induced fervor of adolescent life. It actually made me look forward to what life would be like once I got old...

Read it. Explore these words and you will see that in all your life she can set you free. also...I have had a quote in my head for some time...can anyone tell me if May Sarton wrote this?... ...she became for me an island of light, fun and wisdom, where I could run with my discoveries, torments and hopes and always find welcome...

Much before the popularization of the Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus books, May Sarton put to a few pages this gently told story of a young marriage. And in this small novel, I found, she illustrated in a richly eloquent, and somewhat edited style, the 'big idea'. I read this one wintry week-end as a close friend from Boston was soaking in my bath tub avidly reading MMWV. She had come to visit me in the 'country' of western Mass., seeking answers to a failed relationship, needing the solace of our friendship, and some get-away time from the big city/the 'scene of the crime'. In Sarton's pages was the whole story told with mastery and objective kindness. I have since felt they should be sold side by side. I prefer her rendition. It's a slower read, but, I thought, it was just perfect.

Sarton was a master of the art of letter-writing. The notes are useful, the editing is superb, and Sarton shines through as a rare, passionate, and exacting friend and lover. My only complaint is that this volume is "selected," not "complete." I'm looking forward to Susan Sherman's next presentation of the gentle art to which Sarton stayed dedicated throughout her life.

Laura is dying of terminal cancer. From the moment her doctor tells her she has less than 2 years to live, Laura is determined so see her death as a journey, and she intends to make the journey on her own terms. She quickly realizes that she must come to some sort of "reckoning" with her past, her relationship with her mother, her relationship with her own children, and more curiously, her relationship with a childhood friend, Ella. Although she and Ella have not seen each other in over 40 years, memories of Ella haunt her, and fill her with a sense of peace.

Laura is determined to die her way, with her animals, her memories, her thoughts, her music, her books, and a dear old aunt to read to her in the winter afternoons. These are what she believes to be the "real connections" in life. She does not want to engage in conversation with people who cause her stress (such as her sisters and her children). Laura learns during her journey, that it is through these last conversations and moments with the persons she least wanted to see, that she gains her most valuable insights.

The book has a happy ending. But beware! Sarton's writing is witty, passionate and sophisticated. She uses her psychological knowledge of the human psyche with poignant accuracy.

Lucid, brilliant, astoundingly original, May Sarton is a rare treasure among modern poets. A master of technical form, she never veers from the idea that poetry is for the revelation of individual insights gleaned from often painful experiences. Her uniqueness among the moderns lies in her understanding of the importance of the discipline imposed by traditional form as an instrument of clarity. She is among the very best.

Understanding May Sarton is a comprehensive study of the poetry, fiction, and memoirs of May Sarton, a pioneering feminist whose literary works were underappreciated during her lifetime. Author Mark Fulk explores Sarton's writing as speaking to both genders and all sexual orientations, not just female or lesbian readers, and delves in a literary analysis of the true spirit of Sarton's intent. Covering all of Sarton's work, from her initial poetry celebrating women's sexuality to her coming-out novel and her final novel and volume of poetry about the advancing onset of age. Recommended for American literature, feminism, and women's studies reading lists, Understanding May Sarton is a superb reference and resource.

Literary journals and diaries written for publication are notoriously dicey cultural products. Harold Nicholson's extensive journals were written self consciously with a reading public clearly in mind. Bigamist Anais Nin rewrote her decades - long diary when she finally found an opportunity to publish it, editing out critical facts concerning her life in the process; the end result was a frothy fabrication rather than an accurate reflection of her existence.

May Sarton's frequently irritating The House By The Sea (1976) is the second of her published journals. Experimental first volume Journal Of A Solitude (1973), an unexpected success, was written with painful honesty and only tentative confidence while the author was living alone in a small New Hampshire village. By contrast, in The House By The Sea, Sarton immediately makes it clear that this volume has been commissioned. During the writing of the first, Sarton was caught in a tumultuous romantic relationship, experiencing herself as "old and useless," and discovering that she could no longer write poetry. But The House By The Sea finds Sarton wisely questioning whether or not she has anything worthwhile to say that might justify a second volume. It also reveals that Sarton's previous home in Nelson, New Hampshire, was in fact on the village green in the center of town. Sarton, then, was living alone, as millions of people do, and, like many of those millions, surrounded by and with ready access to other men and women. Thus Sarton's claim to "solitude" becomes questionable.

Sarton, now living alone in a truly isolated, three - story, oceanfront house in Maine, complains continually about the weather, about the imperfect state of her massive lawn and garden, about having routine housework to do, and is often unhappy when she has guests but chronically longs for human companionship when's she's alone. The House By The Sea makes it clear that Sarton is a conflicted individual with little objective sense of her privileged status. Sarton makes it apparent that she has attended Bloombury parties and known Virginia Woolf, Kenneth Clark, Elizabeth Bowen, Vladimir Nabokov, Archibald Macleish, Hilda Doolittle, the Huxleys, and other literary luminaries; she has lived in and traveled extensively through Europe; she has had a home in Cambridge, and taught at some of the most prestigious universities in America; she has and has had friends in influential places, and has been able to publish her novels and poetry for decades. All of which makes Sarton's petty grumbling, however sincere, rather smarmy.

As in Journal Of A Solitude, Sarton contradicts herself and often evidences the same kind of behavior she denounces. She states that her elderly, lifelong friend Celine Limbosch looks "like a poor sad old monkey," and Alison Lurie "a gentle perceptive witch," two expressions she would find objectionable if coming from a man, or even from a woman if directed against herself. She allows herself to be published in Reader's Digest, a venue Virginia Woolf and Sarton's other friends would have had nothing but contempt for, but months later asks why "inspirational writing such as appears in Reader's Digest" makes her "feel angry and upset...sick, cheated, and debased." She goes on at length about two women friends who she feels had illusions about their talent as poets, and says about one, "She was talented but she did not learn anything over the years. The poetry was too abstract and generalized. She never discovered the power of a strong metaphor to lead her to the truth. So what remains is a little theatrical and a little self - indulgent." To those who have read Sarton's poetry, these statements will sound like displacement and the kettle calling the pot black. One of the obvious sources of Sarton's rage in Journal Of A Solitude was her lack of an accurate estimation of her own published work.

Instead of taking the time to exam her thoughts and feelings before taking up her pen, Sarton prefers short sentences punctuated with exclamation points ("How much we forget, and how much that was fresh and clear gets overlaid!" "At last the braces have gone from Tommy's teeth!" "The greatest achievement of the day was shortening a pair of pants!" "She went out on the porch outside her bedroom and sketched immediately after she arrived!" "A grand day on the water!" "Whew!") For a book with literary aspirations, The House By The Sea is absolutely laden with exclamation points; there is at least one every third page, and some pages include two. Sarton also resorts to coarse expressions like "we gobbled it up."

Sensitive, ivory tower - dwelling Sarton offers a lot of undigested, watery, liberal - leaning opinions on the "state of our inner cities," writing that the subject is a cause of "constant anxiety" and morning tears. As in the first journal, Sarton's relationship with and judgment about animals and other subjects at times seems questionable. When Sarton finds a healthy baby rabbit in her cat's mouth, instead of nursing it in a box within an enclosed room, or calling the ASPCA for assistance, Sarton drives to a field and abandons it there, with pious hopes that it will be able to "fend for itself." When she has four guests over for dinner, she buys only a pound and a half of lobster meat to prepare a lobster salad, and happily discovers after the meal that there is some leftover, giving readers cause to suspect that the polite family probably bolted for a MacDonald's upon departure. When she purchases fifty pounds of sunflower seeds for the birds, she thinks $15.50 is a "staggering" price to pay for it.

The House By The Sea lacks focus, pure motive, and substance, but Sarton was a well - intentioned person struggling with herself as well as with the simple day to day problems common to everyone. Less acute than its predecessor, the journal nonetheless succeeds in allowing readers to enter the private, uneasy life of a creative person.

The House by the Sea: A Journal

After Nelson, New Hampshire, Sarton sought what she thought would be a totally "different" life as far as neighbors, company and the like in York, Maine. She was in her mind seeking "personal space". In this succinct journal Ms. Sarton chronicles her "new home" and life in Maine with often great detail and a wide range of emotions. While I am not particularly found of Journals, this one drew me in. I, too, yearn for the harsh ocean environment that the house at York afforded Sarton; the seasons; working in the garden(s);and, relaxing in those veranda recliners and gazing out over the field of tall grass to the ocean(glass of wine in hand). A most excellent piece. If you are not a Sarton reader, this will bring you into the fold.

This is the book which introduced me figuratively and literally to May Sarton! I saw this title in a bookstore and looked through it. WHAT A TREASURE this book became. May Sarton has the ability to cast light across darkness in such a way that the reader is revitalized and nourished. Inner strength is rediscovered. Life is redefined - routine events reclaim their original joy. What is old becomes refreshed. What a gift May Sarton continues to give through her work: life is to be lived and used and appreciated and given for as long as one can. *The House By The Sea* celebrates life, its beauty, serenity and joy. Sarton was most alive when she created life through her work. This theme resonates in all her work and teaches by demonstration the importance of exploring the inner self to find abundance.