SOURCE: Miner, Valerie. “Spinning Friends: May Sarton's Literary Spinsters.” In Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, edited by Laura L. Doan, pp. 155-68. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

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...