[In the following essay, Miner explores the portrayal of spinster women in Sarton's novels, asserting that her characters often are “old women who have used their lives productively, indeed exuberantly.”]

In the mirror she recognized her self, her life companion, for better or worse. She looked at this self with compassion this morning, unmercifully prodded and driven as she had been for just under seventy years.

—May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

She who has chosen her Self, who defines her Self, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is Self-identified, is a Spinster. …

—Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

Spinning a web of literary friendship, May Sarton gives renewed grace and power to single women. “With a hundred threads binding their lives to hers,” as she says of one character in The Magnificent Spinster, Sarton expands and interweaves the definitions of the words “spinster” and “friend.” May Sarton's spinsters are vital, often romantic women engaged in the world as teachers, writers, mentors, colleagues, and social activists.

Cam Arnold devotes herself to writing a biographical novel about Jane Reid as an act of friendship and commemoration in The Magnificent Spinster. Hilary Stevens befriends a troubled young man in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Caro Spencer risks her own safety to protect another resident of her dreary nursing home in As We Are Now. These characters, like Sarton herself, are old women who have used their lives productively, indeed exuberantly. Although some might assume a tension between their friendship and autonomy, it is precisely the self-sufficiency of Sarton and her protagonists that locates their deep and lasting friendships as the source and expression of their best selves. Being spinsters has allowed them to give to their neighbors with time and spirit unavailable to many of their contemporaries who have chosen to reproduce and live in cloistered families.

The identity of the sisterly spinster is enacted in Sarton's own friendship with her characters. Their stories raise provocative notions: spinsterhood as a vocation of social responsibility; companionship as an alternative to motherhood; lesbian bonding as an alternative to marriage; friendship as an alternative to any sexual partnership; and writing as an act of friendship.

In this essay, I explore the uneasy borders between fiction and memoir by observing reflections between the characters in Sarton's novels, The Magnificent Spinster, As We Are Now, and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, and the spinster self-portraits in her journals, At Seventy, Journal of a Solitude, and I Knew a Phoenix. In particular, I am interested in Sarton's representation of the lesbian spinster and the literary spinster.

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN AUTHOR AND CHARACTER

May Sarton manages to create a special familiarity among writer, protagonist, and reader because of the way she balances her work on the boundaries of autobiography and fiction. “I think of myself as a maker of bridges—between the heterosexual and the homosexual world, between the old and the young,” Sarton tells Karen Saum in an interview for the Paris Review (Saum 86). The flexible forms of Sarton's fiction allow unique access to all involved. Each of the three novels under discussion engages the audience in questions about purpose, process, and style of writing.

The Magnificent Spinster is a novel about Cam, a retired history professor, writing a novel about the life of her teacher Jane Reid. Here we learn not only about Cam and Jane but about the intricacies of conveying the qualities of a long friendship in fiction. Sarton is at her best shaping the distinctive temperaments of these friends—balancing Cam's rash enthusiasm and Jane's measured graciousness—revealing how the women complement and confound each other. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is an account of an extended interview with Hilary Stevens, an acclaimed old poet, in which the skeleton of her biography is constructed by the questions and answers, while the rest of her story is fleshed out by her own dramatic internal flashbacks. During the interview, Hilary Stevens reflects on past friendships while developing an incipient friendship with the interviewer Jenny Hare. As We Are Now is a novel written as a journal to be published after Caro Spencer dies. Of these three protagonists, Caro most closely resembles the stereotype of the spinster as an isolated, single, old woman, but the greatest drama of the book takes place within the friendships of her last months and in the fire she sets, destroying her grim nursing home and herself. Caro's final legacy—the journal—is a celebration of those precious relationships as well as a customary gift to those who might follow her into rest homes.

It is easy to find the seeds of these novels in Sarton's life. Jane Reid in The Magnificent Spinster is consciously modeled on Sarton's old friend and teacher Anne Longfellow Thorp. Thorp is lovingly described in I Knew a Phoenix and Journal of a Solitude. Sarton proceeds to discuss the difficult process of writing the novel about Thorp in At Seventy. Like the protagonist in Mrs. Stevens, Sarton lived for a time in England, where she found great artistic nourishment. She, too, had romances with both men and women and found women to be the sustaining muse for her poetry. The inspiration for Caro Spencer's decline in As We Are Now can be traced to a visit Sarton makes to a nursing home in Journal of a Solitude. Indeed, she has Caro's friend repeat the same words as Sarton's friend Perley Cole from Journal: “‘I never thought it would end like this’” (23). All these women share Sarton's white, middle-class, New England background.

Although Sarton's fiction is autobiographical in the sense of memory recalled, it is also autobiographical in the sense of premonition. She relates to the characters in her novels as friends and models for her own life. Mrs. Stevens, a poet verging on seventy, is finally receiving the acknowledgment Sarton desires for her own poetry. The novel, published when Sarton was fifty-three, allows the author to try on the kudos, to see how she would feel looking back at her life from the distance of seven decades. (The name of Hilary Stevens's protégé, Mar, is not so different from the name of his creator, May. Mar's name and personality signify the anger with which Sarton so closely identifies.) This book also permits Sarton to watch Hilary come out as a lesbian in her narrative, before she herself comes out in her journals. Once Sarton reaches her own seventies, she chooses the character Cam, a seventy-year-old woman, to write a novel about Jane, to teach her how to write the novel she herself wants to write about Anne Longfellow Thorp. One step further into old age, Sarton creates As We Are Now, an unflinching study of rest-home existence. In At Seventy, she writes about putting a deposit on a modern, flexible retirement community, no doubt partially in response to her experience struggling with Caro's limited choices. It is useful to remember that the Sarton portrayed in the journals is also a persona shaped by the author. Just as her fiction is autobiographical, her autobiography is a creation of imagination. No doubt the May Sartons who emerge in the work of those who dare to write biographies of this formidable woman will be different characters altogether.

Sarton, then, develops a unique intimacy with her characters, between her characters, between the characters and readers, and between herself and readers. All her prose—fiction and journal—is rendered in a straightforward, yet elegant style. Although some may regard her commitment to realism as old-fashioned, I see it as yet another gesture of friendship because she makes her ideas accessible to a broad range of readers.

SOCIAL VOCATIONS

May Sarton's spinsters forgo marriage for a wider province. Like Louisa May Alcott, they believe that the pursuit of good work and public service is “a better husband than love” (Cook 5). These middle-class women are friends rather than wives—friends over the backfence and in the public arena. Sarton, whose work seems more Edwardian than contemporary, grew up in an era of strong single women, both literary figures and political activists. In Britain as well as the United States, single women were among the most visible early twentieth-century feminists—working in settlement houses, living in single-sex communities, and campaigning for female suffrage.¹ Sarton, whose mother was English and whose father was Belgian, comes from a bourgeois European background noted for championing eccentricity. Given her girlhood acquaintance with genteel, socially concerned women in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is not surprising to find her stories focus on the contributions of publicly generous, personally modest women. In addition, her place as an only child probably helped cultivate an affinity for spinsterly solitude. In Sarton's recollections about her youth, one detects a pleasure in her own company and an aptitude for independence which prepared her for spinsterly success.

Her characters are solitary figures only when narrowly viewed. They are deeply engaged in serving others through education, social activism, and the arts. In The Magnificent Spinster, Cam challenges sexism among her contemporaries and fights against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both she and the subject of her novel, Jane, are dedicated teachers. Jane works with French orphans after World War I and helps Germans reconstruct their lives after World War II. Later Jane confronts Boston racism—and her own bigotry—through her growing friendship with Ellen, the African-American director of the Cambridge Community Center.

Sarton's spinsters are often understated about their social contributions. Not all her spinsters are as comfortable with singleness as Jane is. For instance, Hilary Stevens describes her spinsterhood as deviance in her interview with the young writers Jenny and Peter: “‘For the aberrant woman art is health, the only health! It is,’ she waved aside Peter's attempt to interrupt, ‘as I see it, the constant attempt to rejoin something broken off or lost, to make whole again’” (190). Earlier in the novel, Hilary reassures herself that life is not as bad as it might be, that she did not turn out like Aunt Ida, an artist who was institutionalized because she was suicidal: “Nevertheless, young Hilary reminded old Hilary, you have not done too badly, old thing. You did not break down like Aunt Ida; you kept going; you have worked hard, and you have made a garden, which would have pleased your mother; and once in a while you have been able to be of some use to another human being—Mar for instance” (71). Despite her self-effacing presentation, Hilary has had a very successful writing career and is a stimulating, encouraging friend to numerous people, especially Mar, the defensive young artist. She also inspires her interviewer Jenny: “‘For some odd reason you've given me courage,’ she [Jenny] said, ‘courage to be myself, to do what I want to do!’” (197).

In As We Are Now, Caro Spencer questions the value of her own life after she is put out to pasture:

Did they always hate me, my family I mean, because I was different, because I never married. … A high-school teacher in a small town is (or was in the years when I taught math) not exactly suspect, but set apart. Only in the very last years when I was established as a dear old eccentric did I ever dare have a drink in public! And even among my colleagues, mostly good simple-minded fellows, I did not quite fit in. They had their own club and went off fishing together and on an occasional spree to New York, but of course they didn't want an old maid tagging along. …

(20)

Caro's tightly corseted self-image conceals the cosmopolitan attitudes she has developed in her wise travels and forty years of teaching. Precisely because of her reserved nature, her expressions of loyalty—such as defending a colleague facing dismissal for his homosexuality—are acts of courage. Once in the nursing home, she becomes friends with Standish Flint, another resident. His mistreatment makes her strength flare. “Yet, Caro, remember that anger is the wicked side of fire—you had fire and that fire made you a good teacher and a brave fighter sometimes. Fire can be purifying” (43-44). It is this sacred fire which fuels the keeping of her diary and allows her to leave the world of her own accord.

In the journals, Sarton portrays herself as someone for whom solitude is a respite for nurturing social contribution—whether this is her art; her philanthropy to adopted families and needy friends; her support for HOME, a progressive housing project in Orland, Maine; or her advice to young writers. In I Knew a Phoenix, she honors spinsters who have influenced her life, including her teachers at Shady Hill School and the actor Eva Le Gallienne, who inspired her to give up college and join the theater. Like Sarton, these spinsters may be suspect in the outside world but only because their participation in that world is veiled by stereotype.

ALTERNATIVES TO TRADITIONAL MOTHERHOOD

Because these women are unmarried, their class and generation dictate that they also be childless. For some, this state is a failure; for some a relief; for some an opportunity to “mother” in unique ways. The identity “childless” has taken on various meanings during their long lives. Sarton and her fictional spinsters grew up within an ethic which defined nonmothers as unnatural or barren. They have survived both world wars, experiencing the absence of men on the home front as well as the baby booms following the soldiers' return. They lived through eras when feminists questioned the maternal imperative and celebrated selfhood. More recently, some have found themselves in a period where women—including single heterosexuals and lesbians—are having a renewed romance with biological motherhood. Since Sarton and her characters are all WASPish women, under no pressure to compensate for the genocide of their culture, many would observe that their first contribution is the decision not to add to an already overpopulated world. Perhaps these women don't suffer the impulse to reproduce biologically because they have found other venues for self-creation.

In Journal of Solitude, Sarton describes Anne Longfellow Thorp:

For her, life itself has been the creation, but not in the usual mode as wife, mother and grandmother. Had Anne married she would have led a different life and no doubt a rich one, but she would not have been able to give what she does here and in the way she does. … Here is a personal largess, a largess of giving to life in every possible way, that makes her presence itself a present. … Perhaps the key is in her capacity to make herself available on any day, at any time, to whatever human joy or grief longs to be fulfilled or assuaged by sharing … [or] longs to pour itself out and to be understood. So a teddy bear will materialize as if by magic for a one-year-old who has stubbed a toe; so a young woman who cannot decide whom to marry can have a long talk in perfect peace; so a very old lady can discuss with gusto the coming presidential election and feel a fire to match her own rise up in Anne's blue eyes. The participation is never passive, shot through with a sudden gust of laughter as it often is, always vivid and original.

(172-73)

In contrast, Hilary Stevens is painfully conscious of her abnormality:

“No, the crucial question seems to me to be this: what is the source of creativity in the woman who wants to be an artist? After all, admit it, a woman is meant to create children not works of art—that's what she has been engined to do, so to speak. A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant.”

(190)

Near the end of the book, Hilary says to Mar, “‘No, I think I would have liked to be a woman, simple and fruitful, a woman with many children, a great husband, … and no talent!’” (219, Sarton's ellipsis).

But Sarton's portrayal of the spinster or lesbian as perverted softens with the years. Mrs. Stevens is the earliest of the three novels discussed here. By the time readers meet Caro and especially Cam and Jane, the portrait of the spinster as an estimable figure of solitary strength is less qualified. If one accepts the threads connecting these books, one detects three distinct moods—anxiety in Mrs. Stevens, fury in As We Are Now, and tranquillity in The Magnificent Spinster—revealing a marked emotional moment. Perhaps the self-criticism so raw in Mrs. Stevens is due to the fact that this was Sarton's “coming-out” novel, and the writing process was filled with special conflict. Perhaps, too, she came to a greater peace about her own identity as spinster and lesbian in the years between this novel and the other two.

In As We Are Now, spinsterhood is portrayed both as freedom and loneliness. Caro doesn't think much about children, but, from her attitudes regarding marriage, readers gather that her independence from men and children comes from the same instinct for self-containment. When Anna asks Caro why she never married, Caro pauses, “It was a hard question to answer. How could I tell her, perhaps that I am a failure, couldn't take what it would have cost to give up an authentic being, myself, to take in the stranger? That I failed because I was afraid of losing myself when in fact I might have grown through sharing an equality with another human being. And yet … do I really regret not marrying? No, to be quite hontest, no” (95, Sarton's ellipsis).

Similarly, in The Magnificent Spinster, Cam describes Jane's spinsterhood in terms of potential: “she did not resemble anyone's idea of a spinster, dried up, afraid of life, locked away. On the contrary it may have been her riches as a personality, her openness, the depth of her feelings that made her what she was, not quite the marrying kind … a free spirit” (60, Sarton's ellipsis). And, like Caro and Hilary, Jane serves many different people with her “extra” time. Long after she quits teaching, Jane makes a point of inviting children to her family's country retreat.

Sarton's journals also reflect an active relationship with younger people. One of the most touching parts of At Seventy is Sarton's description of a visit by “little Sarton,” a girl named after her by parents who fell in love while reading her poetry. She also discusses the satisfactions of her friendship with a young scholar named Georgia:

What is wonderful for me is to be with someone whose vision of life is so like mine, who reads avidly and with discrimination, who goes deeply into whatever is happening to her and her family and can talk about it freely, so it feels a little like a piece of music in which we are playing different instruments that weave a theme in and out, in almost perfect accord. I had this experience always with my mother when I came home and we could talk. And I feel so happy that perhaps I can be that kind of mother for Georgia.

(145)

The spinsters in these books are parents in the sense of being mentors and confidantes. While they lack some maternal satisfactions, such as the pleasure derived from physical resemblance between oneself and one's own offspring, they are freed from certain kinds of maternal guilt and legal responsibilities. In The Magnificent Spinster, Jane gently directs Cam. Both Hilary Stevens and Caro Spencer can look back to spinster aunts as inspirational yet admonitory examples. In her journals Sarton emerges as a wise, generous persona, a model for her readers.

In addition to the gratification of reproducing, mothers often look forward to being cosseted by their children in old age. What does a spinster do? Sarton offers various possibilities, from Jane, who is surrounded by loving friends until the end, to Caro, who creates her own end and arranges her own cremation. Caro's death is admirable, tragic, and—in keeping with Mary Daly's glorious self-definition of spinsterhood—transcendent. “Spinsters, too, learn to be at home on the road. Our ability to make our spirits our moving shelters will enable us to dispense with patriarchal shelters, the various homes that house the domesticated, the sick, the ‘mentally ill,’ the destitute” (Daly 395).

For each of these characters—Hilary, Caro, Cam, and the Sarton of the journals—the absence of one's own children is a blessing and a loss. Each in her own way expresses ambivalence and conflict about this aspect of being a single woman. The childlessness is one more instance of her autonomy from the family, if not from the society.

THE LESBIAN SPINSTER

Lesbian friendship is a sanctuary and a stigma for Sarton's spinsters. One conventional definition of spinster is a “woman who has rejected or who has been rejected by marriage.” Today, however, marriage is so broadly rejected in favor of live-in, unmarried partnerships between women and men that the definition is outdated. If one reads “male-linked” for marriage, one has a clearer sense of the current popular definition. All lesbians, whether coupled or not, might claim to be spinsters. By choosing women, they have remained “unmarried” to, and unprotected by, male identity. (While many heterosexual feminists have fought for autonomy within their individual partnerships, they do have privileges unavailable to women who forgo such bonding with males.) Spinsters have historically been identified by what they are not (married) just as contemporary lesbians are ostracized for what they are not (male-linked). This “identity by lack” leaves room for the cultural imagination to conjure new labels. People often seem more threatened by dismissal of patriarchy than by antagonism to it and thus turn the sin of omission into a sin of commission, transforming the medieval spinster into a witch (consorting with the devil is more easily imaginable than not consorting with males at all) and the contemporary lesbian into a pervert. Witch-hunting spirals into gay-bashing. While few of today's lesbian spinsters are burned at the stake, they suffer enormous discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare. To be a lesbian in the United States is to be “illegitimate,” to be substantially without civil rights. Lesbians are declared unsuitable as teachers in certain areas and unfit to immigrate to this country. When lesbians aren't attacked, they, like other spinsters, are often ignored. Individually, some heterosexuals find lesbian bonding so threatening that they refuse to see it, and in an ironic twist on my theme, they interpret the intimacy between longtime partners as a tamer “friendship.” Such women, particularly the older ones, are identified in their jobs and neighborhoods as “spinsters.”

These novels reveal a multiplicity of lesbians, from Cam, who has a long-term relationship with Ruth in The Magnificent Spinster, to Caro, whose last great love is Anna (“I myself am on the brink of understanding things about love I have never understood before” [98]), to Hilary, who struggles with her aberration. Writing Mrs. Stevens was a profound psychological and professional risk for Sarton, as she explains in Journal of a Solitude:

On the surface my work has not looked radical, but perhaps it will be seen eventually that in a “nice, quiet, noisy way” I have been trying to say radical things gently so that they may penetrate without shock. The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens, to write a novel about a woman who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive; to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disguisting, without sentimentality. … But I am well aware that I probably could not have “leveled” as I did in that book had I had any family (my parents were dead when I wrote it), and perhaps not if I had had a regular job. I have a great responsibility because I can afford to be honest. The danger is that if you are placed in a sexual context people will read your work from a distorting angle of vision. I did not write Mrs. Stevens until I had written several novels concerned with marriage and family life.

(90-91)

In fact, Sarton did lose teaching engagements as a result of the book's publication. Her poetry has been censored from school texts, not because of explicit sexual references but simply because she is now widely known as lesbian.

On the other hand, this visibility has brought many lesbian readers. The revelation also has freed her to write more openly about her own relationships in the journals. In Journal of a Solitude and At Seventy, she looks back on her primary partnership with Judith Matlock, an English professor. Matlock, lover, friend, and Friend (a committed Quaker) lived with Sarton for fifteen years.

Sarton, however, is not doctrinaire. The lesbian connections are honored without any of the throat-clearing fanfare of more didactic lesbian novels. Moreover, just as she poses lesbianism as an alternative to marriage, she poses nonsexual friendship as an alternative to sexual partnership. Comrades and companions are often valued over lovers. Sexual relationships are often set in the past or in the background of a story. The strongest relationship in The Magnificent Spinster is between Cam and Jane—a friendship of cherished mutual development. In As We Are Now, Caro's current friendship with Standish, Reverend Thornhill, and Lisa are more important than any sexual partnership. Mrs. Stevens ends as it began, showing Hilary cajoling young Mar. The last scene is filled with affection, hope, and a provocative sexual energy: “For a second they confronted each other, the bold blue eyes of Mar and the hooded gray eyes of Hilary. Then at the same instant, each reached for a pebble and threw it down. The two pebbles struck the water about two feet apart, and they watched avidly as the two great widening ripples intersected” (219).

In Sarton's journals, the sexual partnerships are also masked (as in the reference to “X” in Journal of a Solitude) or set in the past. Sarton is at her most vital when greeting friends in her house in Nelson, Massachusetts, or York, Maine. She frequently complains about her voluminous correspondence with people she has met through her books, but, of course, the descriptions of such correspondence are what prompt so many fans to write.

WRITING AS AN ART OF FRIENDSHIP

Like spinning wool or silk or webs, Sarton's writing is a process of conserving the essential while transforming it into something useful for herself and others. Sarton spins her stories with intelligence and craft. Much as early spinsters turned their wheels, she uses her hands and wit to recycle raw experience.

Cam describes her impulse to write about Jane:

What then has driven me so late in life to write a novel? Quite simply the unequivocal need to celebrate an extraordinary woman whom I had the good fortune to know for more than fifty years until her death a year ago. …

I realized that in a few years everyone who knew Jane would be dead. Who would remember her? In fifty years who would know she had existed? She never married. There would be no children and grandchildren to keep her memory alive. She was already vanishing like sand in the ocean. … Then, almost without thinking, I went into my study, forgetting all about lunch, and began to write.

(13, 14, third ellipsis Sarton's)

In As We Are Now, the most meaningful and candid connection Caro has is with readers—of her letters, her imaginary letters, and the journal which she intends to be read after her death. The journal is an epistle from hell. Her last act of friendship before setting fire to the rest home is to hide the journal in a refrigerator where it will not burn, where it will be preserved for others.

For Sarton, literary friendship is an exchange involving various levels of interaction with members of her audience as well as with her characters. She is neither puppeteer nor omniscient benefactor. She needs her readers. Sarton's most popular work is her journals, which resemble long letters addressed to a broad-based audience of friends. Indeed, many pages contain fragments of letters she has received from her readers or descriptions of feelings these letters have evoked. The personal connections become even more direct. Sarton reclaims storytelling as an oral form in offering readings all over the country to standing-room-only crowds. She does booksignings where people wait two hours to exchange a word and get an autograph. She describes one of these events in At Seventy:

At three the next afternoon she drove me to a very different part of the city, a slum that is being rehabilitated, and there I found myself among “my people” at the Crazy Ladies—a subway crush of young and old but mostly young in blue jeans and sweaters, crowding around to get Journal of a Solitude signed (that is one for the young) and of course Anger. Some had brought a great pile of my books from home. Many had things to say to me, but it was rather a rush as the line was long and the time short. At the end of two hours when I had not stopped making my mark, it looked as though the bookstore may have been saved (they are having a hard time), and everyone was happy. And on the way back to the Regency and Heidi, two women from the cooperative told me they thought they had sold $1,500 worth. Once more I felt lifted up on all the delightful caring of these people who read me.

It cannot be denied that it is these days a very good life for an old raccoon of seventy.

(210)

Such encounters buffer Sarton against the pain and fury about what she considers the unfair treatment—not just negative evaluation—of her work by the reviewing establishment. She describes two more personal exchanges earlier in At Seventy:

When Webster was here last winter he asked me shyly whether I would be willing to give him a signed copy of A Reckoning in exchange for the work done. I told him he was getting the lean end of the bargain, but he insisted the book would do it.

In the same order of good happenings, Bob Johnson at the florist's left a round planter filled with spring plants, a hyacinth, two yellow primroses, and some lilies on the terrace, this time with a note to say how he felt about Recovering. What do critics matter when workmen and florists are moved to respond with their gifts to mine?

I sometimes imagine I am the luckiest person in the world. For what does a poet truly want but to be able to give her gifts and find that they are accepted? Deprived people have never found their gifts or feel their true gifts are not acceptable. This has happened to me more than once in a love relationship and that is my definition of hell.

(45)

May Sarton's spinsters are friendly women. Being spinsters allows them time to attend to numerous and often unlikely people. Like that legendary spinster Charlotte, who rescues her friend by spinning magical words, May Sarton's spinsters tend to their friends in their writing and through their lives.² We may hope the future of this tradition will be as luminous as its past, which extends at least as far back as Sappho, who wrote:

Tell everyone
Now, today, I shall
sing beautifully for
my friends' pleasure

Notes

1. For an excellent study of single women, see Vicinus.

2. This reference was inspired by Daly. Generally, I found Daly's work to be very provocative in the writing of this essay.

Works Cited

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “Incomplete Lives?” Women's Review of Books 3 (1985): 5.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon, 1978.

Sappho. “Tell Everyone.” Sappho: A New Translation. Ed. Mary Barnard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958.

Sarton, May. As We Are Now. New York: Norton, 1973.

———. At Seventy. New York: Norton, 1984.

———. I Knew a Phoenix. New York: Norton, 1959.

———. Journal of a Solitude. New York: Norton, 1973.

———. The Magnificent Spinster. New York: Norton, 1985.

———. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965.

Saum, Karen. “The Art of Poetry XXXII, May Sarton.” Paris Review 25 (1983): 80-117.

Vicinus, Martha, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.