by May Sarton
She went into the great hall and looked up at the portrait of her great-grandmother, and rested her eyes on the small elegant neck, on the bright dark eyes in the very oval face, on the surprising stubborn lower lip.
“You knew what you wanted,” she said to herself. Yes, she had known what she wanted and yet she had not died here in the house after all.
It was now that the absolute silence rushed out around her so that for just a second she felt dizzy, as if she were dissolving and had herself become a ghost Identity flowed away into that silence. It was a matter, she knew, instinctively now, of attack. She must not let herself be invaded by this silence. She must dominate it.
So she walked, she did not run to the backstairs and said to Annie quite quietly, “Annie, dear, do you suppose I could find an old pair of gloves somewhere? I need them.”
“Whatever for, doatie? I’ll take a look round, but first you’d better sit down and have a sip of tea.” Annie was already on her way to the stove with a cup in her hand. But she was stopped by a kind of authority in Sally’s voice.
“I really must have them now, Annie. You see, what I must do is to clear out those nettles in the stables. It’s been on my mind for weeks.”
Annie started to say something, gave one look at the set face in which determination had driven out all other feelings, and changed her mind. She disappeared into one of the many cupboards and came back holding out a pair of very dirty crumpled old brown cotton gloves.
“Would these be what you were looking for?” she asked with a barely perceptible twinkle in her eye.
“That’s wonderful, thanks,” Sally said and fled up the stairs again and out, running as if she would be fatally late for an appointment.
Well there are ways and ways of curing a broken heart, Annie was thinking, but pulling nettles is a new one. And she thought with satisfaction, she’s a Dene all right. Characters every one of them. You never know what to expect.
But of course she was wrong. For Sally among the nettles was happy, was for the moment fulfilled by something more than love. She was “inside” all that she had been outside of for so long, and she was inside it alone and free. Pulling out the nettles was the first gesture of a prisoner released.
A Biography of May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.
Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.
At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).
On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.
In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.
For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.
While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.
In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book, Punch’s Secret, followed by A Walk Through the Woods in 1976. During the seventies, Sarton was diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.
In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion there of in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1952 by May Sarton
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8547-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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