[In the following review, Miner praises The Magnificent Spinster as “provocative in itself and as a mirror of past work, reflecting such classic Sarton issues as social conscience, aging, women's autonomy, friendship and the nature of art.”]

When I was young,
I misunderstood
The Muse.
Now I am older and wiser,
I can be glad of her
As one is glad of the light.
We do not thank the light,
But rejoice in what we see
Because of it.
What I see today
Is the snow falling:
All things are made new.

“Of The Muse,” May Sarton

The Magnificent Spinster, May Sarton's forty-second book, is a model and metaphor of her literary life. A rather magnificent spinster herself, Sarton has had an iconoclastic and prolific writing career, publishing seventeen previous novels, fourteen books of poetry, eight volumes of non-fiction and two children's books. This complex new novel is provocative in itself and as a mirror of past work, reflecting such classic Sarton issues as social conscience, aging, women's autonomy, friendship and the nature of art. The Magnificent Spinster will be of particular interest to the many feminists exploring the uneasy borders between the literary genres, between author and subject and between public and private life.

Sarton's books are infused with a European urbanity, a Yankee sternness and a raffiné pugnaciousness. Born in Belgium in 1912, she has spent most of her life in New England, but has also lived abroad for years. She was nominated for two National Book Awards in 1956, but since then has fallen out of fashion among members of the literati too busy being clever-clever to appreciate the brilliant simplicity of her style and the passionate courage of her ideas. Some reviewers have even criticized her for being closeted in her writing, forgetting that she lost a couple of jobs in 1965 because of the lesbianism of Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. But readers have long applauded her traditional narrative approach, her direct, accessible language as well as her examination of moral development. And readers keep her books alive. The latest journal, At Seventy, made the best-seller list and Norton has launched The Magnificent Spinster with a rumored 40,000 first printing.

One of those avid readers myself, I first think of the intellectual pleasure and spirit of hope I derive from her work. Looking around my desk, I find her poem “Dead Center” taped on the wall and a quote from At Seventy dangling from the file trays. While preparing this essay, I “dipped into” her novel, Anger, but couldn't put the book down. As a lesbian novelist 35 years younger than Sarton, I am invigorated both by the power of her books and the brave persistence of her career. Carolyn Heilbrun, one scholar who has long acknowledged her talents, says of Sarton's life in her introduction to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, “Yet the inner life has been sustained: Neither alcohol, nor breakdown, nor the sinister satisfaction of personal cruelty has claimed her. Agonizing, in letters and conversation, over life's injustices, she has never ceased to examine with artistry her demons of anger and despair, and her consolations of solitude and love.” While there are many gaps between Sarton's world and mine—including class, politics and partiality to cats—I, like many of her diverse readers, am sparked by the honest, fervent and disciplined practice of her art. The new novel is a satisfying reconsideration of former themes and a journey into new territory.

What is familiar in The Magnificent Spinster is the cherished New England setting and the nature of the two protagonists—charming, cultivated women of elegant determination. The book opens as Cam Arnold, a retired history professor, is beginning to write a novel about her beloved teacher and lifelong friend Jane Reid, who has just died. Cam's book requires extensive research into Jane's life as well as hours of contemplation of her own life.

Born in 1896, Jane grows up with four sisters in a wealthy Boston family complete with a British nanny. After graduating from Vassar, she goes to France to assist with World War I orphans. She returns to Cambridge to teach elementary school and to work as a community activist. Throughout her life, Jane exudes a radiant talent for friendship.

Meanwhile, Cam matures under Jane's light, attends Vassar, sets off for Europe, comes back to teach history at a small college near Boston and continues to flourish in Jane's friendship. Sarton is at her best shaping the distinctive temperaments of these friends—balancing Cam's rash enthusiasm with Jane's grace—and in revealing how the women complement and confound each other.

It is the private greatness of Jane and Cam that distinguishes The Magnificent Spinster. The book's power lies not in the characters' high drama, but rather in the quality of their deeply engaged days. Cam is practicing a sort of feminist history, recovering the worldly contributions of an “unpublic” public woman. (Her book recalls stories from another spinster history, Martha Vicinus' splendid Independent Women.) Jane chooses a single, singular path which would be better understood and appreciated by subsequent generations.

Inspiration for The Magnificent Spinster came from Sarton's own primary school teacher, Anne Longfellow Thorpe, to whom the book is dedicated. And it is perhaps this proximity which accounts for the novel's one serious fault: Cam's portrayal of Jane is overly reverent and sentimental. Sometimes we are told about Jane, rather than being permitted to see her in person; Cam (or Sarton) presumes an intimacy between Jane and the readers she has not quite created.

In contrast, Cam's own character is vital and idiosyncratic. I suspect Cam's prominence in the novel was a second thought. Sarton said in a lecture on “The Design of the Novel” (given at Scripps College in 1963), “Characters, if they are alive at all, prove to have an existence of their own, insist on breaking out of too arbitrary formulations. A character may change the whole tone of a novel by its intrusion, by its radical thrust up from the subconscious.” The Magnificent Spinster turns into a story about Cam as well as about Jane and about the two of them together.

Although Sarton's books could hardly be called political novels (with the exception of Faithful Are the Wounds), most of them are set in the framework of an acute social conscience. Here, for instance, we find Cam challenging sexism among her contemporaries and fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. We see Jane helping Germans reconstruct their lives after World War II and then returning to contribute to the Cambridge Community Center. Jane confronts Boston racism—and her own bigotry—through her growing friendship with Ellen, a Black woman who directs the Center. Jane, fueled with asexual passion, is at first shocked when her cousin Jay confides he is homosexual, but ultimately comes to his defense in a court case. Throughout The Magnificent Spinster, lesbian attraction is acknowledged without the throat-clearing fanfare of more didactic lesbian novels. Cam and her lover Ruth share a tender, satisfying life.

Understated social context marks other Sarton novels—in the examination of the dreadful treatment of old people in As We Are Now; in the consciousness about rights of the dying in A Reckoning; in the exploration of academic ethics in The Small Room.

In an interview with Karen Saum (The Paris Review, no. 89), Sarton said,

I think of myself as a maker of bridges—between the heterosexual and the homosexual world, between the old and the young. As We Are Now, the novel about a nursing home, has been read, curiously enough, by far more young people than old people. It terrifies old people to read about other old people in nursing homes. But the young have been moved by it. Many young people write me to say that they now visit elderly relatives in these places. This is the kind of bridge I want to make.

In The Magnificent Spinster, May Sarton, a 73-year-old novelist, is writing about Cam, a 70-year-old historian, who is writing about Jane, who recently died at 86. Sarton's characters emerge with vibrant individuality. Jane's friend Frances observes, “… one trouble with all the statistics and all the generalities is that old age is as singular an experience for each person as childhood is.” Both Jane and Cam watch their friends and relatives dying as they, themselves, age. But death is less of a threatening shadow than a timely reminder to live their own lives fully and to honor those who have finished living—as Jane does by publishing a friend's letters and as Cam does by writing her novel about Jane. Readers may recall the firm resolve of the dying Laura in A Reckoning, “The time I have left is for the real connections.” I also think back to the title poem in Sarton's Halfway to Silence, a book of love poems published in her sixty-eighth year:

I was halfway to silence
Halfway to land's end
When I heard your voice.
Shall I take you with me?
Shall we go together
All the way to silence,
All the way to land's end?
Is there a choice?

Sarton reclaims the word “spinster” with an ardor worthy of Mary Daly, who writes in Gyn/Ecology, “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. …” For anyone dismayed by the current feminist infatuation for motherhood, it is refreshing to read a novel in which the women do stand on their own. Being spinsters allows Cam and Jane to give to their communities with time and spirit unavailable to those who have chosen to reproduce and live in cloistered families.

Jane spins a web of allegiances with friends and colleagues, “Yes, with a hundred delicate threads binding a hundred lives to hers. …” This is a novel about friendship in which the profound connections are companions and comrades and confidantes rather than lovers. We follow Jane's friendship with Cam, with Ellen, Frances, Marian and Lucy. This thread of sustaining personal loyalty seams together other Sarton fiction and journals like The House by the Sea as well as her poetry.

Alive to the loving past
She conjures her own.
Nothing is wholly lost—
Sun on the stone.
And lilacs in their splendor
Like lost friends
Come back through grief to tell her
Love never ends.

“For Laurie”

Sarton plays on the boundaries of fiction, autobiography and biography, deftly revealing how every story is about author as well as subject. Here we have Sarton writing a biography of her favorite teacher by writing a novel about Cam who is writing a novel about Jane.

One of the subplots involves the search for an appropriate biographer for Jane's illustrious grandfather, yet another writer. “‘But heaven knows,’” says her cousin Jay, “‘no biography tells the whole truth. It is truth filtered through someone's mind … someone of another generation, often, as in this case—the whole ethos has changed.’” Cam offers a more benign view of the biographer: “… in fifty years no one will exist who remembers Jane Reid. I want to celebrate her. I want to make her come alive for those people who never knew her.” Jane is Cam's muse as well as her mentor. The Magnificent Spinster is a startling portrait of Cam as a woman coming into her own as an artist at the age of 70.

For Sarton, as for Cam, writing arouses reflection about the pulse of life and the meaning of work. Sarton's most explicit discussion of writing occurs in her journals. For instance, in Journal of a Solitude she says, “the poem is primarily a dialogue with the self and the novel a dialogue with others. They come from entirely different modes of being. I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.” Ten years later, in At Seventy:

What kept me going was, I think, that writing for me is a way of understanding what is happening to me, of thinking hard things out. I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself. Perhaps it is the need to remake order out of chaos over and over again. For art is order, but it is made out of the chaos of life.

That art is a challenge and blessing to the artist is a common Sarton theme. Writing Jane's story has the same distilling satisfaction for Cam that “serving Bach” has for Anna in Anger or composing poetry has for Hilary in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.

The greatest human qualities, for Sarton, are “Courage and imagination—those two.” Jane and Cam and Sarton herself refine those questions. As Sarton said in “The Design of the Novel,” 22 years ago,

There is always the danger of a failure of nerve. And this is the more true, the greater the body of work the writer carries along with him. It is easy to write a first novel, and it becomes increasingly difficult as one proceeds. Partly one knows more; what one is trying to say becomes more complex. Partly, anything achieved in the past becomes the enemy of the achievement of the present. Will it be as good as … is the dreadful question that lurks in the small hours of the night.

Sarton doesn't need to lose sleep over The Magnificent Spinster. This addition to her “landscape” is an intricate, yet accessible experiment in form; a testimony to independence; an enlightening portrayal of old age; a celebration of friendship and an engrossing story.