SOURCE: Heilbrun, Carolyn G. “May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.” In Hamlet's Mother and Other Women, pp. 148-59. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Heilbrun views Sarton as an outsider and speculates how this position has affected her work.

May Sarton's life is a mirror image of the usual American success story. In those wildly famous lives where, Scott Fitzgerald has told us, there are no second acts, the glories and riches soon betray the writer to madness, impotence, alcohol, literary vendettas, and the ashes of despair. For Sarton, perhaps uniquely so, considering the accomplishment, there has been little organized acclaim, no academic attention,¹ indifference on the part of the critical establishment. 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...