SOURCE: Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “Another Model of the Aging Writer: Sarton's Politics of Old Age.” In Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, pp. 49-60. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

In the following essay, Wyatt-Brown investigates different theories of aging and productivity and applies them to Sarton's treatment of the elderly in her work.

In 1990 I was asked to present a paper on May Sarton's The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989) at a meeting which the novelist herself was to attend. Unfortunately, the novel initially disappointed me. Some of Sarton's literary decisions seemed baffling. Why should the novelist, who spent her middle age celebrating the courage of elders, as Kathleen Woodward has demonstrated, suddenly write about a woman more than ten years younger than she?¹ Moreover, the fairy-tale elements of this story undermined the credibility of the plot.

On first...