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Sarton's achievements in any of her chosen genres would assure her a place of respect in American letters. For example, women's groups all over the world study her nine journals for their insights into women and the creative process. She wrote often about her work as a writer and the tasks of shaping everyday life. Perhaps the most famous of such books isJournal of a Solitude (1977) in which Sarton explores both the joys and terrors of living alone.
Her poetry often invites the same kind of intimacy with a reader that her journals do. Many of the settings and characters in the poems are those of her journals.
In the journals, Sarton sometimes examined her lesbian relationships. The late journals are the most open about her lesbianism. The subject, however, was central to her work throughout her career. For many years, she lived with Judith Matlack, and she remembered this relationship inHoney in the Hive (1988). Sarton wrote with great honesty and charm about this and other relationships as well.
The persona who emerges from the journals is feisty, joyous (particularly in Nature's changes and beauty), and dedicated to keeping her craft alive, often despite hostile critics.
Of twentieth-century poets, Sarton is somewhat of an outsider in that she often preferred metered, rhymed verse to free verse. Her last three collections, however, suggest a greater interest in free verse. Sound, for her, was not a minor consideration as she built a poem; it largely determined the line.
HerSelected Poems was published in 1978, arranged by theme rather than chronology. In 1993, a new collected poems appeared, including many poems that had been out of print for many years.
Sarton said that for her the Muse was always female. In her taleThe Poet and The Donkey, her main character Andy Lightfoot becomes inspired only through the presence of a female Muse. The donkey becomes the missing Muse; Nature brings a Muse to the poet when the poet is ready (perhaps without knowing it) to write.
The poem is not the only element of experience illumined by the presence of a creature. One of Sarton's most beloved books,The Fur Person (1957), portrays two women who live with a cat who, essentially, adopts them as his owner. While the owners are referred to as "old maids," this book suggests a subtle re-evaluation of the role of the spinster in society. As Andy Lightfoot needs the donkey, these two women need their "fur person" to complete their family. Sarton never patronizes the animal world; such a world gives beauty and definition to the lives of her characters.
Sarton's fiction, like her poetry and journals, became more lesbian-identified with the passing years. Of her nineteen novels, perhapsThe Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989) andMrs. Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing (1965) most closely focus on the awakening of a lesbian identity.
The Education Of Harriet Hatfield is particularly frightening; the opening of a woman-centered bookstore leads to violence--and difficult questions for the protagonist. Here Sarton confronts dead-on.
In interviews, Sarton expressed anger at critics who derided her novelA Reckoning (1978), which contains a memorable portrait of a gay male son, by marginalizing it as a "lesbian novel."
Sarton's work in nonfiction extends from her journals to twelve portraits of significant figures in her life inA World Of Light (1976). Subtitled "Portraits and Celebrations," this book gives a glimpse into the lives of her father, her mother, some friends, and some literary figures such as Elizabeth Bowen and Louise Bogan. The anecdotal style creates an intimacy, as if one is listening to Sarton speak personally with the reader about these people. The settings and milieu in which she met or knew these people emerge as she probes their characters.
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