May Sarton wrote poetry, novels, children's books, anthologies, and nonfiction, but she may be remembered longest for her journals. AT SEVENTY takes place in 1982, when Sarton lived in New England at her rural retreat with her vast garden and her two cats--one a present from Carolyn Heilbrun.

Sarton begins AT SEVENTY with the arrival of the daffodils "a tiny bunch of miniature daffodils, blue starflowers, and glory be two fritillaries." She is back from a month of poetry reading in Connecticut and remarks that her friend Edith Haddaway has left a small bunch of roses for her birthday.

Over the course of the book, Sarton describes her daily struggles with her garden, her typewriter, and her overcommittment to persons and events that seem to keep her from "solitude" and hence writing. Her journal is filled with the activities of a life fairly well lived, though she is not without some regrets and sad remembrances including the loss of her European homeland. AT SEVENTY provides the reader with a peak behind the scenes of how Sarton coped with growing older and the day-to-day necessary interruptions of living, and yet managed to create poetry and other writing.

Sarton

May Sarton's life alone is as inspiring as her work. This graceful and fluid journey through her young life gives us a glimpse of the experiences and ideas that formed her later work. She's truly a gem.

"Letters from Maine" is a gorgeous collection of meditations on nature, love, and various internal truths. Sometimes celebratory and passionate and sometimes introspective and melancholy, these poems flower in the mind and leave the reader blissful. May Sarton is more known for her fiction, but certainly her poetry is worthy of similar attention.

I enjoyed this book about a poet who had lost his muse and then finds her once again in the form of a donkey. Not only does he find his muse but he learns things about himself along the way. This is a short, sweet read that is funny and thought provoking as it glides along.

I have enjoyed several books by May Sarton, but not this one. Rather than telling a story, she's written a polemic - a soft diatribe against people who hate people because they are different in some way. The writing is good, but the whole thing is stiff and the events repetitive.

The main character, Harriet, makes friends way too easily. Her bookstore is a hit, which I believe, and Harriet's mourning of her lost lover who died recently is also realistic.

Another problem is I couldn't tell when the book was supposed to take place. Harriet and another guy (a doctor) were smoking cigarettes! Also she seemed stuck in the 1940s with her friend Angelica Lamb (what a stupid and obvious name) who has a maid who cooks dinner for her!

Overall the book is just not a good novel.

I can't say this book isn't well-written, it is. But it seems rather self-consciously "uplifting". The characters in it are all a bit too noble; dialogue is awkwardly formal, even for well-to-do, highly educated people. Friendships with oh-so-wonderful people are formed so easily and quickly. Many, many people like these do exist -- I know many of them; but the writer seemed to make the situation rather than let it happen -- a bit of a fairy tale, in spite of the realities of hatred that it discusses. I couldn't place the period when this takes place; Mary Daly's book, central to the story, was published in 1998, but the copyright on this novel is 1989.

This book may not be a portrait of extreme left wing revolutionaries, but it is about real people, fighting the real struggle of day to day life in world which chooses not to understand. Sarton's characters are magnificent. Harriet's determination to succeed and survive is truly an inspiration.

Margot Peters' biography of May Sarton is a mess of facile psycho-babble and Harlequin romance narration. She reduces the details of this very complex life to pat conclusions ("May compulsively punished those who dared love her.") and achingly bad narrative ("Secretly, like a primrose opening in her heart, there was the thought that if she got abroad, Grace must join her."). Read this book to get a basic sense of the chronology of May Sarton's life, if you must, but do not let Peters' neat conclusions stand as the last word on the subject. Sarton's life and work, troubled as they both were, deserve more careful attention. She did herself a disservice (when she was quite old and ill) by choosing Peters as her "official" biographer.

I gave this a '4' (rather than a 5) because, like so many contemporary biographies, Margot Peters shows us many sides of May that those who have had their lives saved by her work would rather ignore. Do I want to know that my icon was sexually, emotionally and financially abusive her friends . . . probably overly arrogant . . . often bitter . . . Probably not. Do I need to know this fully to appreciate her work and fully to assess her import in my life? YES . . . "Without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers." Without fully embracing the shadow -- my own and those of my mentors -- I can never come to wholeness. After reading Peters' book I have found much more depth and vision in my re-encounter with Sarton's poetry and novels . . . the journals, on the other hand, can never for me be the same again. Caveat emptor.

I think the reviewers of this book who pat themselves on the back for not being taken in by the "persona" of May Sarton should go back to her journals again -- especially "Journal of a Solitude." It seems to me that Sarton was very much aware of the unpleasant aspects of her own nature, the twists and turns of mood, the antisocial tendencies, the destructive effect of anger. Should she be condemned because she allowed the persona of "sister, mother, lover, mentor, friend" to take on a life of its own, to the point that millions of fans can still see her no other way? The persona itself has the power to heal -- even if the real woman was faced, as we all are, with sorting out the mess of her life. The fact that Sarton knew this biography would be published showing her "warts and all" was telling -- certainly not the final act of a hypocrite.
This is not an easy biography, and fans of Sarton may be put off for awhile after reading it, but I found that after time I was able to go back to her books with more understanding, and more appreciation, for the writer and person of May Sarton. Highly recommended!

Although I am an avid reader of Ms. Sarton's work, this novel was hard to get through. I find the characters unsympathetic, and the story itself rather ponderous. As a seed-ground for her later work, it's worth a look; but if this is your first or only time with Ms. Sarton or her novels, look elsewhere, for there is some fine stuff.