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Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
May Sarton's ninth novel explores a woman's struggle to reconcile the claims of life and art, to transmute passion and pain into poetry. As it opens, Hilary Stevens, a renowned poet in her seventies, is talking with Mar, an intense young man who has sought her out and whose passionate despair reminds her of herself when young. Mar has had an unhappy love affair with a man. Bewildered by both his sexuality and his writing talent, he flings his anguish against Hilary s brusque, sympathetic intelligence."
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
May Sarton
154 books598 followersMay Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton boldly came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her later memoir, Journal of a Solitude, was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton died in York, Maine, on July 16, 1995.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 89 reviews
June 4, 2019
Although I’m a huge fan of Sarton’s memoirs (especially Journal of a Solitude) and enjoyed her Collected Poems, this was my first taste of her fiction. I confess to being underwhelmed: this book is rather slight and strangely unfeminist. Part of the problem may be that I know so much about Sarton’s life that I couldn’t help but see all the autobiographical detail in her descriptions of Hilary F. Stevens’s life and habits. Like Sarton, she’s a somewhat reclusive writer who has had success with both poetry and novels and now lives alone, with only the memory of a number of passionate love affairs to sustain her.
This was 1965, so the fact that several of Mrs. Stevens’s lovers were women may have been revolutionary at the time – certainly it was seen as Sarton’s coming-out book, although it’s not at all sexually explicit.
Most of the novel’s action takes place in one day, as Mrs. Stevens awaits the arrival of two interviewers. She’s a mentor of sorts to a young man named Mar who helps her with the gardening now that she is in her seventies. Mar is a budding poet and a frustrated homosexual – two experiences she can weigh in on. “I saw you as a person of primary intensity,” she tells him; “they are rare. They live in Hell a good part of their lives, a Hell of their own making, but they are the only people who ever amount to anything.”
The arrival of interviewers Peter and Jenny prompts much discussion of the Muse and the artist’s development as well as many private flashbacks to Mrs. Stevens’s past in the moments when she steps away to compose herself. Here are a few of the typical Mrs. Stevens statements that I objected to:
What backward, binary thinking! Had society not advanced since 1897, when Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion suggested that lesbians are men trapped in female bodies? I truly didn’t expect this from Sarton. I can only explain it away as the influence of the age. I also rather detested this sentence: “Hilary knew that she must be very quiet, not let her enormously articulate person overwhelm or break the small thread that was at last there between them [her and Mar].”
All the same, there are some great one-liners about creativity and passion here:
For me, though, Sarton’s journals are a better source of deep thoughts on the writer’s vocation, the value of solitude and the memory of love. I’ll certainly read more of Sarton’s novels (I have The Magnificent Spinster and Faithful Are the Wounds on my Kindle), but I doubt I’ll ever appreciate them as much as her nonfiction.
Note: Looking through some of the reviews of Mrs. Stevens that came out at the time (in May Sarton: A Bibliography, second edition, Lenora P. Blouin), I can see I’m not the only one to think the book thin and ideologically questionable:
This was 1965, so the fact that several of Mrs. Stevens’s lovers were women may have been revolutionary at the time – certainly it was seen as Sarton’s coming-out book, although it’s not at all sexually explicit.
Most of the novel’s action takes place in one day, as Mrs. Stevens awaits the arrival of two interviewers. She’s a mentor of sorts to a young man named Mar who helps her with the gardening now that she is in her seventies. Mar is a budding poet and a frustrated homosexual – two experiences she can weigh in on. “I saw you as a person of primary intensity,” she tells him; “they are rare. They live in Hell a good part of their lives, a Hell of their own making, but they are the only people who ever amount to anything.”
The arrival of interviewers Peter and Jenny prompts much discussion of the Muse and the artist’s development as well as many private flashbacks to Mrs. Stevens’s past in the moments when she steps away to compose herself. Here are a few of the typical Mrs. Stevens statements that I objected to:
Powerful women may be driven to seek the masculine in each other.
Women have moved and shaken me, but I have been nourished by men.
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.
What backward, binary thinking! Had society not advanced since 1897, when Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion suggested that lesbians are men trapped in female bodies? I truly didn’t expect this from Sarton. I can only explain it away as the influence of the age. I also rather detested this sentence: “Hilary knew that she must be very quiet, not let her enormously articulate person overwhelm or break the small thread that was at last there between them [her and Mar].”
All the same, there are some great one-liners about creativity and passion here:
Yet one writes to find out.
How to separate art and craft from life?
We live in a curious age, in an age where passion is suspect.
There was a secret joy when they walked down the street together … to know that from the outside what people saw was two middle aged women, but inside they were wild children, wild with joy.
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
For me, though, Sarton’s journals are a better source of deep thoughts on the writer’s vocation, the value of solitude and the memory of love. I’ll certainly read more of Sarton’s novels (I have The Magnificent Spinster and Faithful Are the Wounds on my Kindle), but I doubt I’ll ever appreciate them as much as her nonfiction.
Note: Looking through some of the reviews of Mrs. Stevens that came out at the time (in May Sarton: A Bibliography, second edition, Lenora P. Blouin), I can see I’m not the only one to think the book thin and ideologically questionable:
New Yorker: “This is hardly a novel but a nice book.”
Saturday Review: “embarrassing because of its acute self-consciousness”
Southern Review: “Sarton is a careful craftsman with considerable intelligence, but she is shallow. Mrs. Stevens is a self-pitying phony … and Sarton, for understandable reasons, can’t see through her. … Sarton leaves us with fine craftsmanship and a trivial view of man and … poetry.”
Kirkus: “The tone of Hilary’s rambling is adolescent, self-admiring, and full of adroit self-justifications.”
Time: “Hilary gushes about lyrical art and Mar moons about his poetry and love for a sailor. Nothing else happens.”
Times Literary Supplement: “the form of the book is not viable; there are too many pronouncements of truths and the moments of real fiction occur too rarely.”
October 23, 2016
Upon its publication in the early 1960s, May Sarton worried that Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing would result in her forever being classified as a lesbian writer. That she was a lesbian was no secret since she had lived an openly homosexual life including relationships with notables such as Elizabeth Bowen. Her concern was that readers would focus on the characters' bisexuality and miss what she had to say about love which to her was the same whether it was shared as part of a gay or straight relationship. Early in Mrs. Stevens... Mrs. Stevens tells a young protegee, "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see..." and then counsels that it doesn't matter whom one loves as long as one does. Love to Sarton is a journey of discovery, with self discovery being perhaps the greatest end to the quest.
The plot of the novel details a day in the life of the now elderly Mrs. Hilary Stevens, upper middle class American, raised in genteel remoteness by stylish parents in Boston and abroad. In early adulthood she finds herself the author of a controversial novel which she thinks is a fake and then soon after as the wife of a seemingly robust Englishman who had been ruined by the war. Later she becomes a poet of some renowned, and then a forgotten poet buried in anthologies. At the point where the novel begins, Hilary's secluded life on Cape Cod has been interrupted by a late wave of fame. Her newest volume of poems has raised interest in her again, hence on the day of the story she is to be interviewed by a pair of reporters. Her preparations for the interview have caused her to rethink her life and work, and especially the influences of some of the Muses to her art. In relief to this, she has become a mentor to a young man who is suffering from the failure of a love affair between himself and an older man.
Readers who like a pensive book about love, life and art which is long on soul though light on action are likely to enjoy this novel. As always Sarton's prose has a womanly sturdiness to it, nearly as fragrant and vivid as Colette's, an author summoned several times by Mrs. Stevens. One thing that Mrs. Stevens insists on is that woman writers must retain their femininity.
I found Mrs. Stevens oddly similar to John Updike's Seek My Face. The similarity was so striking that midway through I sought out my volumes of Updike's reviews and essays to see if at any point he mentioned Ms. Sarton's novel. I found little mention of Sarton at all. Odd since they have a great deal in common.
The plot of the novel details a day in the life of the now elderly Mrs. Hilary Stevens, upper middle class American, raised in genteel remoteness by stylish parents in Boston and abroad. In early adulthood she finds herself the author of a controversial novel which she thinks is a fake and then soon after as the wife of a seemingly robust Englishman who had been ruined by the war. Later she becomes a poet of some renowned, and then a forgotten poet buried in anthologies. At the point where the novel begins, Hilary's secluded life on Cape Cod has been interrupted by a late wave of fame. Her newest volume of poems has raised interest in her again, hence on the day of the story she is to be interviewed by a pair of reporters. Her preparations for the interview have caused her to rethink her life and work, and especially the influences of some of the Muses to her art. In relief to this, she has become a mentor to a young man who is suffering from the failure of a love affair between himself and an older man.
Readers who like a pensive book about love, life and art which is long on soul though light on action are likely to enjoy this novel. As always Sarton's prose has a womanly sturdiness to it, nearly as fragrant and vivid as Colette's, an author summoned several times by Mrs. Stevens. One thing that Mrs. Stevens insists on is that woman writers must retain their femininity.
I found Mrs. Stevens oddly similar to John Updike's Seek My Face. The similarity was so striking that midway through I sought out my volumes of Updike's reviews and essays to see if at any point he mentioned Ms. Sarton's novel. I found little mention of Sarton at all. Odd since they have a great deal in common.
February 3, 2024
This book won me over at first with its charming, touching portrayal of cantankerous old poet-novelist F. Hilary Stevens (Sarton pettily refuses to unfurl that initial) and her hot-headed young friend Mar Hemmer, whose relationship with her inspires a volume of poetry that brings her belated recognition as an artist. Unfortunately, this in turn brings two journalists (Sarton needs her to speak with both a man and a woman) to her seaside home for a 112-page interview, which turns out to be one of the most preposterous things I've ever read.
The interview itself is bad enough, a kind of philosophical dialogue in which Mrs. Stevens feistily explains poetry's need for a Muse (typically an unrequited love, typically female) and art's tension between pseudo-Jungian gender archetypes – all hot air in any case except hers and presumably Sarton's – but it's used as a platform for a fascinatingly stupid literary device: the diegetic flashback. Each of Mrs. Stevens's books of poetry was inspired by a particular Muse, and whenever the conversation turns to one of these books, she falls into a catatonic reverie reliving her entire relationship with the Muse who inspired it. The first time, she gets a pass from the journalists ("Curiously, the five minutes or so had not seemed an interruption to any of the three" – curiously indeed!), but by the end, she's literally struggling to remain lucid for her guests, and the routine is only broken by force: "This time Peter pounced as she was about to escape into one of her absences. 'This time say it aloud.' " (It's anyone's guess how Peter knew that these "absences" were flashbacks to say aloud and not a tumor in urgent need of treatment.) Crazy stuff, but what's crazier is how none of the other readers here mention it at all, even in passing. Did we read the same book?
It would be a lot easier to play along with this contrivance if the flashbacks themselves made up for it, but they sink the book regardless of their presentation. The first, a young Hilary's futile infatuation with her governess, is tenderly affecting, a vignette that would easily stand on its own as a short story, and sets a bar that the others couldn't clear with a ladder. In the second, Hilary is bedbound in a quack therapy that results in poetic brilliance because her doctor is a Muse, and a Muse has, by virtue of existing, whatever convoluted effect on her psyche Sarton wants. (In case the diegetic flashback wasn't clumsy enough, there's also a bon mot that the doctor "no doubt" gave to an assumed reproach – a slip into third-person omniscient would have been a much smaller offense than this pretense otherwise, especially in a book also featuring shifts of tense and person that go unexplained.) The penultimate episode is the worst, pairing Hilary with a sociologist in an appallingly trite head-vs.-heart duel ("How can you turn people into numbers? What truth is there in statistics? How inhuman can you get?" she splutters) that made me take a day off from reading the book. The other flashbacks aren't this bad, but they aren't too good either, driven by contrived psychology and cheap coincidence.
Eventually, the interview reaches its merciful denoument, and Mar comes back to get his closure, but the "epilogue" (I dispute that 22 pages of climax and resolution for the story that filled the first 72 can be an epilogue) does little to redeem the book. Mar gets histrionic, Hilary piles on the quasi-theory, and when everything's settled, Sarton makes them act out a ham-handed bit of symbolism to end the book on a perfectly sour note.
Apart from the distracting but ultimately superficial issue of the diegetic flashbacks, the problem with this book is that its central character's increasingly esoteric ideas about art and sex require increasingly improbable figures and relationships to illustrate and motivate them, but while there are scattered early hints of the hogwash to come, the first half of the novel is simple enough to be effective. In a way, though, it's a worse book overall for it, a Trojan horse that I had to trust at the beginning to truly hate (rather than simply dismiss) by the end.
The interview itself is bad enough, a kind of philosophical dialogue in which Mrs. Stevens feistily explains poetry's need for a Muse (typically an unrequited love, typically female) and art's tension between pseudo-Jungian gender archetypes – all hot air in any case except hers and presumably Sarton's – but it's used as a platform for a fascinatingly stupid literary device: the diegetic flashback. Each of Mrs. Stevens's books of poetry was inspired by a particular Muse, and whenever the conversation turns to one of these books, she falls into a catatonic reverie reliving her entire relationship with the Muse who inspired it. The first time, she gets a pass from the journalists ("Curiously, the five minutes or so had not seemed an interruption to any of the three" – curiously indeed!), but by the end, she's literally struggling to remain lucid for her guests, and the routine is only broken by force: "This time Peter pounced as she was about to escape into one of her absences. 'This time say it aloud.' " (It's anyone's guess how Peter knew that these "absences" were flashbacks to say aloud and not a tumor in urgent need of treatment.) Crazy stuff, but what's crazier is how none of the other readers here mention it at all, even in passing. Did we read the same book?
It would be a lot easier to play along with this contrivance if the flashbacks themselves made up for it, but they sink the book regardless of their presentation. The first, a young Hilary's futile infatuation with her governess, is tenderly affecting, a vignette that would easily stand on its own as a short story, and sets a bar that the others couldn't clear with a ladder. In the second, Hilary is bedbound in a quack therapy that results in poetic brilliance because her doctor is a Muse, and a Muse has, by virtue of existing, whatever convoluted effect on her psyche Sarton wants. (In case the diegetic flashback wasn't clumsy enough, there's also a bon mot that the doctor "no doubt" gave to an assumed reproach – a slip into third-person omniscient would have been a much smaller offense than this pretense otherwise, especially in a book also featuring shifts of tense and person that go unexplained.) The penultimate episode is the worst, pairing Hilary with a sociologist in an appallingly trite head-vs.-heart duel ("How can you turn people into numbers? What truth is there in statistics? How inhuman can you get?" she splutters) that made me take a day off from reading the book. The other flashbacks aren't this bad, but they aren't too good either, driven by contrived psychology and cheap coincidence.
Eventually, the interview reaches its merciful denoument, and Mar comes back to get his closure, but the "epilogue" (I dispute that 22 pages of climax and resolution for the story that filled the first 72 can be an epilogue) does little to redeem the book. Mar gets histrionic, Hilary piles on the quasi-theory, and when everything's settled, Sarton makes them act out a ham-handed bit of symbolism to end the book on a perfectly sour note.
Apart from the distracting but ultimately superficial issue of the diegetic flashbacks, the problem with this book is that its central character's increasingly esoteric ideas about art and sex require increasingly improbable figures and relationships to illustrate and motivate them, but while there are scattered early hints of the hogwash to come, the first half of the novel is simple enough to be effective. In a way, though, it's a worse book overall for it, a Trojan horse that I had to trust at the beginning to truly hate (rather than simply dismiss) by the end.
April 9, 2025
I'm startled by the many middling reviews here; but then, I'm also not. The purview here is small—a deep dive into one poet's life as she recalls it over the course of a single day—& it's admittedly insular in its hyper-articulated obsessions over the minutiae of the artistic life, but for me the cracks that slowly surface across the genteel surfaces of Mrs. Hilary Stevens' life felt cavernous & vast in meaning. There's a clear-eyed grappling with the contradictions & complexities that inevitably occur across the span of a full, long, adventurous life that I found so admirable. In the end I was, I admit, very moved.
Often struck me as a more accessible take on many of the same topics/themes of the great novelists of memory (Woolf, Proust, etc), which means it's being compared to some of the all-time greats. Its achievements are certainly (much) smaller, but to dismiss it for not scaling the greatest literary heights is to deprive oneself of so many minor pleasures—& everyday epiphanies.
"'They,' who said, 'How wonderful it must be to be a writer,' as if writing were a game of solitaire and one did not have to fight like a tiger for a moment's peace and quiet! Not to mention the struggle itself, the daunting of the doddering old servant, the persistent will necessary to get down to it when one had finally clawed one's way through to a piece of time."
Often struck me as a more accessible take on many of the same topics/themes of the great novelists of memory (Woolf, Proust, etc), which means it's being compared to some of the all-time greats. Its achievements are certainly (much) smaller, but to dismiss it for not scaling the greatest literary heights is to deprive oneself of so many minor pleasures—& everyday epiphanies.
"'They,' who said, 'How wonderful it must be to be a writer,' as if writing were a game of solitaire and one did not have to fight like a tiger for a moment's peace and quiet! Not to mention the struggle itself, the daunting of the doddering old servant, the persistent will necessary to get down to it when one had finally clawed one's way through to a piece of time."
June 28, 2013
1965. This book is one of those changed-my-life-books that come along once in a while. I can't be expected to review it impartially therefore. I suspect it may have some flaws, but for me it came along perfect at the perfect time and swept all other possible concerns away. I suspect it is a bit didactic, possibly dry, dated, not radical enough. Who cares? It was as Bob Dylan says in Tangled Up In Blue: And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
March 25, 2009
Carolyn Heilbrun writes an introduction which puts Sarton's book in perspective. The novel will be of interest to anyone who suspects that the creative woman often pays a great emotional price. My first Sarton book, though I've started a couple of her journals. The day I finished the book (March 23rd) I found a used copy of "Journal of a soitude," her diary for one year. I suspect that I'll find that I appreciate the non-fiction more than the novel. Stay tuned!
August 21, 2008
This book changed my life; I decided to become an English major after reading it. Sarton is one of the most under-rated authors/poets of the 20th century.
Want to read
July 17, 2017Can you believe I'm still finding books on our bookshelves that I've never heard of? Nathan picked this out and carried it around for like an hour, and I asked Joanne what it was, and she said it was pretty good.
January 7, 2015
Do you really think it is impossible for a woman and a writer to lead a normal life as a woman?
I live in a small town that I moved to two years ago. I'm not the friendliest person and I work at home, by myself. Some mornings, some afternoons, I fall into the trap of thinking that no one experienced this, that all my struggling with family and motherhood and solitude and attempts at writing are somehow new and unique. It can be a bit of a kick in the gut to have it pointed out the exact opposite: other women have thought about what I think about now. Other women have written their thoughts down on it. I'm hardly alone; I just have to reach out.
So we have Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing. During an interview, an author reflects on her books, her life, her loves (male and female), the Muse (female). She reflects on the difference between solitude (a good thing) and loneliness (a bad one). She befriends a college student smarting from his first gay encounter. It takes place over two days. In one sense, even written in 1965, stands up today. Dateless: authors still write, struggle to find the Muse, get married, break-up, and women still try to have-it-all. In another sense, it's a book about feminism without the benefit of second-wave feminism, and there's a datedness in the assumptions of what roles women can play. There's a datedness in Mrs Stevens' recollections of her gadabout twenties and thirties, floating around Europe, one would assume wearing trousers and having gin fizzes and charleston dancing. It takes more imagination to relate to that.
The introduction, written by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (who the Internet tells me is an American Feminist Academic), mentions that the writing does not match the depth of the ideas. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed it if it hadn't been said, but then, once read, that was all I could notice. The novel's beginning is a cliché: Mrs Stevens waking up and thinking about what she's going to do that day. Metaphors are obvious. The whole book is plagued with measles or chickenpox or something that makes there be "..."'s on each page (oh, how I despise ellipses unless they are being used as in a mathematical statement, i.e. x1,x2,…,xn). People talk in a way that never feels natural to me, but I wasn't alive in the 1960s and maybe that was how upper-class-type people spoke. The dialogue reminded me of watching The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when I was only six or seven, where, at least to a six year old; there's that sort of affectation to the speech that distances the viewer/reader. You have to look past that, the introduction suggests. Look past that and see what's underneath.
And so, what did this book tell me? Can I write while female and still have a normal female life? Mrs Stevens didn't, but tells one of her interviewers she can try. She can hope. Maybe I can too, provided I "[fight] my war to get to [my] desk before [my] little bundle of energy has been dissipated."
(This review brought to you while my partner entertains the child in the basement with Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2, so maybe it's less impossible to combine all this than it may seem.)
This reissue of Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing by May Sarton went on sale July 22nd, 2014, but the book was originally published in 1965.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I live in a small town that I moved to two years ago. I'm not the friendliest person and I work at home, by myself. Some mornings, some afternoons, I fall into the trap of thinking that no one experienced this, that all my struggling with family and motherhood and solitude and attempts at writing are somehow new and unique. It can be a bit of a kick in the gut to have it pointed out the exact opposite: other women have thought about what I think about now. Other women have written their thoughts down on it. I'm hardly alone; I just have to reach out.
So we have Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing. During an interview, an author reflects on her books, her life, her loves (male and female), the Muse (female). She reflects on the difference between solitude (a good thing) and loneliness (a bad one). She befriends a college student smarting from his first gay encounter. It takes place over two days. In one sense, even written in 1965, stands up today. Dateless: authors still write, struggle to find the Muse, get married, break-up, and women still try to have-it-all. In another sense, it's a book about feminism without the benefit of second-wave feminism, and there's a datedness in the assumptions of what roles women can play. There's a datedness in Mrs Stevens' recollections of her gadabout twenties and thirties, floating around Europe, one would assume wearing trousers and having gin fizzes and charleston dancing. It takes more imagination to relate to that.
The introduction, written by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (who the Internet tells me is an American Feminist Academic), mentions that the writing does not match the depth of the ideas. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed it if it hadn't been said, but then, once read, that was all I could notice. The novel's beginning is a cliché: Mrs Stevens waking up and thinking about what she's going to do that day. Metaphors are obvious. The whole book is plagued with measles or chickenpox or something that makes there be "..."'s on each page (oh, how I despise ellipses unless they are being used as in a mathematical statement, i.e. x1,x2,…,xn). People talk in a way that never feels natural to me, but I wasn't alive in the 1960s and maybe that was how upper-class-type people spoke. The dialogue reminded me of watching The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when I was only six or seven, where, at least to a six year old; there's that sort of affectation to the speech that distances the viewer/reader. You have to look past that, the introduction suggests. Look past that and see what's underneath.
And so, what did this book tell me? Can I write while female and still have a normal female life? Mrs Stevens didn't, but tells one of her interviewers she can try. She can hope. Maybe I can too, provided I "[fight] my war to get to [my] desk before [my] little bundle of energy has been dissipated."
(This review brought to you while my partner entertains the child in the basement with Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2, so maybe it's less impossible to combine all this than it may seem.)
This reissue of Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing by May Sarton went on sale July 22nd, 2014, but the book was originally published in 1965.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
October 12, 2014
I really didn't like this book. I got it for free during my trial Kindle Prime subscription and even though I read most of it, I couldn't motivate myself to finish it before my trial subscription ended. I've read and enjoyed a couple of May Sarton's journals and I had just finished her novel, The Way We Live Now, so I thought I would check this one out since it's so highly esteemed as a lesbian novel that doesn't portray lesbianism in a negative or depressing light. Maybe it was unique at the time, but it was trapped in the pre-feminist thinking of the time, assuming that women must choose between family/relationships and art. I think it also assumed that men would never change, that the pre-feminist selfishness of men was somehow innate, and that men had nothing to gain from women having their own lives instead of catering only to them. It was interesting in how it looked at what it means for women to have muses. But it was too abstract and unemotional to ultimately capture my interest.
November 2, 2008
"Hilary Stevens half opened her eyes, then closed them again."
Hilary Stevens is the mature poet and novelist, and in this novel she remembers the difficulties she has experienced in life, both in the areas of love and of being an artist. She counsels a young man facing his first real crisis in love and in writing, and she attempts to explain her life to two interviewers, there to understand the writer. This is a novel of character and ideas, not action. I found it intriguing. A similar more contemporary novel on the same general theme is Seek My Face, by John Updike.
Hilary Stevens is the mature poet and novelist, and in this novel she remembers the difficulties she has experienced in life, both in the areas of love and of being an artist. She counsels a young man facing his first real crisis in love and in writing, and she attempts to explain her life to two interviewers, there to understand the writer. This is a novel of character and ideas, not action. I found it intriguing. A similar more contemporary novel on the same general theme is Seek My Face, by John Updike.
January 25, 2014
I read this book a long time ago..in the early seventies..
After reading it, I wrote to May Sarton and then began a long correspondence and therein lies a tale.. I was influenced by her work for awhile.. Love her journals.. and some of her poetry..
Almost met her, but we had a falling out about that.
After reading it, I wrote to May Sarton and then began a long correspondence and therein lies a tale.. I was influenced by her work for awhile.. Love her journals.. and some of her poetry..
Almost met her, but we had a falling out about that.
January 29, 2016
There’s a lot I like about this book—the weaving together of poetry, solitude, gender roles in the creative arts, pondering the Muse. But what pleases me the most is the presence of a woman protagonist who is old and intelligent. These have become so important to me. I’m a sponge as I look for roadmaps and for unfamiliar paths through the expansive forests of Old.
August 28, 2024
men are dense and simple creatures
July 25, 2017
"May Sarton's ninth novel explores what it means to be a woman and a writer, to have chosen, perhaps, to be lonely. Dealing with the question of the sources of a woman's creative impulse, it has struck a responsive chord in an increasing number of readers.
"The complexity of human love in its many guises also is Miss Sarton's concern. When the book opens, Hilary Stevens, a formidable personality and a poet of renown, is in her seventies. This singularly uncompromising heroine becomes the quarry of two young reporters from a national magazine whose assignment is to uncover the provenance of Hilary Stevens' poetic inspiration. In the course of their afternoon interview Hilary comes to terms with her own past as it has crystallized in a series of encounters with the Muse.
"Miss Sarton defines this book as a 'picaresque novel in which all the adventures are inward.' It is a novel about love and the sources of poetic imagination. Through the protagonist's keen eyes, we also confront the fear of feeling which dominates our American ethos, and we are made aware of the crippling effect this fear may have on the young.
" 'We have to dare to be ourselves.' Miss Sarton's heroine says, 'however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.' In this challenging book imagination is the pivot, and the courage to be oneself is the fertilizing theme."
~~back cover
I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't read this book. Miss Sarton tends to be very supercilious about her philosophy of life, and very dogmatic when proselytizing about it. Which she always seems to be doing. She's already taken her young neighbor in hand to "save" him by page 34, and I found I just couldn't bear it.
I've discovered I don't like pontification and arrogant superiority thinly disguised by a less-than-riveting plot and called a novel. I had the same difficulty with The Mists of Avalon wherein the author spent a great deal of time blathering on about how matriarchy and the old ways (i.e. feminism) are so superior to paternalism, etc. She was preaching to the choir, but I still wanted to throw the book at the wall (it's a huge book -- it would have made quite a dent. So I didn't.) Even more strongly, the tone and structure reminded me of Atlas Shrugged: wherein just a small elite was intellectually superior, overwhelmingly more competent, and therefor godlike and the rest of us had better understand that and just be content with the menial jobs and mediocre wages our inferiority entitled us to.
So many books, so little time. And certainly not enough time to force myself to read books I'm either not enjoying or not learning anything from. Onward!
"The complexity of human love in its many guises also is Miss Sarton's concern. When the book opens, Hilary Stevens, a formidable personality and a poet of renown, is in her seventies. This singularly uncompromising heroine becomes the quarry of two young reporters from a national magazine whose assignment is to uncover the provenance of Hilary Stevens' poetic inspiration. In the course of their afternoon interview Hilary comes to terms with her own past as it has crystallized in a series of encounters with the Muse.
"Miss Sarton defines this book as a 'picaresque novel in which all the adventures are inward.' It is a novel about love and the sources of poetic imagination. Through the protagonist's keen eyes, we also confront the fear of feeling which dominates our American ethos, and we are made aware of the crippling effect this fear may have on the young.
" 'We have to dare to be ourselves.' Miss Sarton's heroine says, 'however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.' In this challenging book imagination is the pivot, and the courage to be oneself is the fertilizing theme."
~~back cover
I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't read this book. Miss Sarton tends to be very supercilious about her philosophy of life, and very dogmatic when proselytizing about it. Which she always seems to be doing. She's already taken her young neighbor in hand to "save" him by page 34, and I found I just couldn't bear it.
I've discovered I don't like pontification and arrogant superiority thinly disguised by a less-than-riveting plot and called a novel. I had the same difficulty with The Mists of Avalon wherein the author spent a great deal of time blathering on about how matriarchy and the old ways (i.e. feminism) are so superior to paternalism, etc. She was preaching to the choir, but I still wanted to throw the book at the wall (it's a huge book -- it would have made quite a dent. So I didn't.) Even more strongly, the tone and structure reminded me of Atlas Shrugged: wherein just a small elite was intellectually superior, overwhelmingly more competent, and therefor godlike and the rest of us had better understand that and just be content with the menial jobs and mediocre wages our inferiority entitled us to.
So many books, so little time. And certainly not enough time to force myself to read books I'm either not enjoying or not learning anything from. Onward!
June 3, 2012
Dang. I'm pretty sure there was a super-cool revelation in the last few pages of this, but she lost me. I feel stupid.
Otherwise, I liked the book, but I just didn't love it. The first half showed potential to be lovable (for me), but it petered out from there. And, going back to my first remark, I don't generally mind not completely understanding a book, but in this story it just got tiring to not wholly grasp the themes and the epiphanies of the characters.
Otherwise, I liked the book, but I just didn't love it. The first half showed potential to be lovable (for me), but it petered out from there. And, going back to my first remark, I don't generally mind not completely understanding a book, but in this story it just got tiring to not wholly grasp the themes and the epiphanies of the characters.
August 30, 2007
an incredible book about the choices of an artist ranging between her craft and her lovers. inspring really.
October 16, 2023
What an odd book—perhaps most insightful for providing a glimpse of 1965’s understanding of gender essentialism. The novel moved from the relationship of an older female poet and a young male one who are drawn to each other through both poetry and the love that dare not speak its name—to an oddly essentialist meditation on gender and artistic creation that kept making me want to give them some Woolf to read. It’s sad to think that a woman would consider herself so monstrous—and have such rigid notions of gender.
March 5, 2018
This was my Christmas book from my dad this past year and it is lovely. I had no expectations but it was a simple elegant story of one woman's memories and life lessons. I appreciated so much of the reflections on life, love and poetry. It was a quick and accessible read that was perfectly timed for where I have been these last couple of days. If you would like a reflective book this is one for you!
December 21, 2014
Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is re-published by Open Road Media in 2014, with an introduction by Carolyn G Heilbrun. It first appeared in 1965, and was her first openly gay or lesbian novel. Sarton, the poet, diarist and novelist, tried to reject the label “lesbian writer”, preferring to consider herself a writer who plumbed the depths of emotions and relationships, whatever the nature of the relationships being described.
Reading the novel 50 years after initial publication certainly reveals that some books are of their time: what might have been frank and almost shocking back then reads tamely now. The “lesbian” parts of the novel are meek indeed – blink, you feel, and you’d almost miss them.
The story centres around the poet and one-time novelist Hilary Stevens, now in her 70s, who had success with a novel when she was in her twenties, but has since turned to poetry. The novel takes place within a day of her life as she waits for interviewers from a literary magazine who are coming to talk to her that afternoon about her life and work. Within this framework, Hilary returns to episodes in her life.
Memory forms a counterpoint and backbone to the almost quotidian story of a writer waiting for interviewers, pushed to re-live her life through the past while anticipating their questions. The book reads as a mediation through a writer’s mind – the story weaving and meandering through her past, as she wakes, talks with a young man, Mar, who helps her with her garden, and goes through the hours until the interviewers come.
We learn of Hilary’s young marriage, her novelistic success as a young woman in England at the time and her subsequent widowhood. “Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening self,” she tells the young, questing Mar, searching in his own way through his own burgeoning alternative sexuality.
The interviewers, Jenny and Peter, are young, polite, conscientious readers of her work, bringing a respect to the proceedings that Hilary has always craved. They also open the door on another pre-occupation that seems quaint to debate now: whether women can truly be artists given the demands on them to wives and mothers, and the debate runs right through the past, through Hilary’s reminisces into the present day interview. Says Jenny to Peter while they drive down to Hilary: “I guess women pay a pretty high price for whatever talents they have. I guess it’s harder for them than it is for a man, always.”
Peter counters with his belief that, “A writer’s life is obsessed, driven ... I just don’t believe you can do it with your right hand while your left hand rocks a cradle, Jenny!”
The debate will come up again, and seem antique reading them from a distance that includes the feminist movement of the 1970s when so many barriers holding women back in the western world have tumbled, and being a woman writer or a woman anything is not quite the struggle it was back in the mid 1960s.
Antique too, in its way, is Hilary’s assertion that she loved both men and women – as did Sarton herself. There are no tell-all passages in her reminisces or her comments in the interview with Peter and Jenny – the comments are almost an aside, even, barely there. Yes, they might have been more shocking back in that less frank and more straight-laced era. But reading them against a background of the 21st century means you start wondering what the fuss was about. But that’s the thing with reading this novel – you have to peel away the layers and read it rather differently than a contemporary novel. The revelation of homosexual love was almost scandalous, shocking and Sarton’s publisher advised her against publishing it. That she did was an act of bravery, and meant she was forever after “outed” as a lesbian writer – which, as I mentioned, caused its own discomfort.
I was curious to read this classic – having recently come to Sarton via her melodious, almost dream- like published journals. I found it somewhat meandering, with ironically, the past reminisces holding more interest, and containing more meat than the present day narrative. The older Mrs Stevens comes across as somewhat pernickety, too cautious – a contrast to the younger, more daring woman who went on to choose writing as her life’s work. Perhaps that’s a consequence, so to speak, of age – the slowing down. When Mar complains of feeling so tired, at his young age, Hilary exclaims, “Good God, boy, you’ve only just begun!”
And yet, in many ways, this is a rich novel, a story that takes in the vicissitudes of time, what it means to be a writer, and one who lives alone, what it means to love, to survive, to live and question both the times you find yourself in, as well as to attempt to break out of those strictures, as the fictional Hilary Stevens attempted, and as Sarton herself so often achieved. Reading this novel against the biographical elements of Sarton’s life you can’t help comparing the fictional with the real life writer – there seems so much of Sarton transmogrified into the ageing Stevens, finally finding herself in her late, but welcome fame.
Reading the novel 50 years after initial publication certainly reveals that some books are of their time: what might have been frank and almost shocking back then reads tamely now. The “lesbian” parts of the novel are meek indeed – blink, you feel, and you’d almost miss them.
The story centres around the poet and one-time novelist Hilary Stevens, now in her 70s, who had success with a novel when she was in her twenties, but has since turned to poetry. The novel takes place within a day of her life as she waits for interviewers from a literary magazine who are coming to talk to her that afternoon about her life and work. Within this framework, Hilary returns to episodes in her life.
Memory forms a counterpoint and backbone to the almost quotidian story of a writer waiting for interviewers, pushed to re-live her life through the past while anticipating their questions. The book reads as a mediation through a writer’s mind – the story weaving and meandering through her past, as she wakes, talks with a young man, Mar, who helps her with her garden, and goes through the hours until the interviewers come.
We learn of Hilary’s young marriage, her novelistic success as a young woman in England at the time and her subsequent widowhood. “Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening self,” she tells the young, questing Mar, searching in his own way through his own burgeoning alternative sexuality.
The interviewers, Jenny and Peter, are young, polite, conscientious readers of her work, bringing a respect to the proceedings that Hilary has always craved. They also open the door on another pre-occupation that seems quaint to debate now: whether women can truly be artists given the demands on them to wives and mothers, and the debate runs right through the past, through Hilary’s reminisces into the present day interview. Says Jenny to Peter while they drive down to Hilary: “I guess women pay a pretty high price for whatever talents they have. I guess it’s harder for them than it is for a man, always.”
Peter counters with his belief that, “A writer’s life is obsessed, driven ... I just don’t believe you can do it with your right hand while your left hand rocks a cradle, Jenny!”
The debate will come up again, and seem antique reading them from a distance that includes the feminist movement of the 1970s when so many barriers holding women back in the western world have tumbled, and being a woman writer or a woman anything is not quite the struggle it was back in the mid 1960s.
Antique too, in its way, is Hilary’s assertion that she loved both men and women – as did Sarton herself. There are no tell-all passages in her reminisces or her comments in the interview with Peter and Jenny – the comments are almost an aside, even, barely there. Yes, they might have been more shocking back in that less frank and more straight-laced era. But reading them against a background of the 21st century means you start wondering what the fuss was about. But that’s the thing with reading this novel – you have to peel away the layers and read it rather differently than a contemporary novel. The revelation of homosexual love was almost scandalous, shocking and Sarton’s publisher advised her against publishing it. That she did was an act of bravery, and meant she was forever after “outed” as a lesbian writer – which, as I mentioned, caused its own discomfort.
I was curious to read this classic – having recently come to Sarton via her melodious, almost dream- like published journals. I found it somewhat meandering, with ironically, the past reminisces holding more interest, and containing more meat than the present day narrative. The older Mrs Stevens comes across as somewhat pernickety, too cautious – a contrast to the younger, more daring woman who went on to choose writing as her life’s work. Perhaps that’s a consequence, so to speak, of age – the slowing down. When Mar complains of feeling so tired, at his young age, Hilary exclaims, “Good God, boy, you’ve only just begun!”
And yet, in many ways, this is a rich novel, a story that takes in the vicissitudes of time, what it means to be a writer, and one who lives alone, what it means to love, to survive, to live and question both the times you find yourself in, as well as to attempt to break out of those strictures, as the fictional Hilary Stevens attempted, and as Sarton herself so often achieved. Reading this novel against the biographical elements of Sarton’s life you can’t help comparing the fictional with the real life writer – there seems so much of Sarton transmogrified into the ageing Stevens, finally finding herself in her late, but welcome fame.
June 2, 2021
Loved loved loved the first part but the conversation with the interviewers, which is almost half the length of the book, didn’t make any sense at all... That was quite disappointing and left me a bit confused and annoyed.
The novel is set during little more than a day and tells the story of mrs Stevens, a famous poet in her seventies, through short and evocative flashbacks and the encounter and friendship with a boy, Mar, who inhabits the present of the narration.
By page 10 I was completely mesmerised by this novel and its poetic, sparse and yet very deep and evocative style. It felt like the book was written for me on so many occasions:
“it’s monstrous, but nothing seems real to me unless I can say it. This morning, for instance, this walk, all the time I am trying to find a word for that green of the beech leaves. Why not just see them? It’s idiotic!” (page 43).
This and many other examples* in the book felt like the author was telling me things about myself I never realised or were able to put into words myself. Many people say they read to experience lives far and different from their own, I tend to read to find me and see, understand things about myself I didn’t even know where there. This book did this.
The character is drawn into her past and she tells us about the significant people in her life, the persons who created that sparkle in her and indirectly summoned the Muse who opened the dialogues from which her poetry emerged. It’s a fairly short novel so each character that is evoked from Mrs Stevens’ memory is described in just a few pages but it’s as if the author went quickly but surely to the essence of the characters and their relationship with our main character (let’s call her by her first name, Hilary).
The author spends something like 10 pages on Hilary’s husband (she married young in her 20s) and the prose is so exact, so full of wisdom and sentiment (not soppy at all though!! Actually very cerebral) that I was so moved by the end of that part. This I take as a sign of a great book: it spoke to me with just a handful of pages whereas there are novels hundreds of pages long where I have more time to familiarise myself with the characters but I end up being less invested in their story. For example, Hilary’s husband fought in WWI and the way this aspect is introduced into the story has the same immediacy and impact of a strong poetry verse. He was full of life and vitality, would use his body to the point of exhaustion, than pop a pill for the pain that shrapnel wounds left behind and carry on. He and his friends party all the time, drink too much and never look back or talk of the trenches, where each one of them lost almost all the people they had known before the war but the sadness, that infinite darkness was always there, camouflaged.
The relationship with the boy Mar, explored at the very beginning of the book is what sold me. They couldn’t be more different in terms of walks of life but they find each other and help each other. He is a young brooding man, who spends the time he took off from Cambridge sailing in his uncle’s boat, ridden with guild that shouldn’t be there and questioning his homosexuality, despising himself for it. He seeks Hilary’s help and they start a beautiful friendship where each learns from the other, makes mistakes and is ultimately very human and fallible.
Reminiscing about her past is painful for Hilary and it threatens to drag her down a spiral of depression but she is incredibly resilient as she dispels her ghosts and concentrates on the here and now to regain her energies. This really sounds like a good mindfulness technique and I was so positively surprised to read about it here.
The part titled “the interview” continues Hilary’s trip down memory lane but it also introduces a rather lengthy conversation with the interviewers which, apart from discussions of inspiration, the muse and poetic epiphanies, and what it means to be a female writer (questionable ideas about the feminine and masculine, falsely feminist stances and a little too much self-indulgence here), was a big question mark for me. And when I say question mark I mean: “what are they talking about exactly?? This is complete gibberish!” It wasn’t obscurely philosophical or poetic so much as a piece of theatre of the absurd without any intelligible analysis or ideas!
So that was disappointing.
*But I want to finish this review with some of my favourite quotes just to give an example of this book’s compassion and warmth:
“There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always toward chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart” (page 21).
“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting” (page 23).
“Use your bean, start thinking!” “It seems to me I have been doing nothing else!” “Going around in a circle isn’t thinking” (page 34).
The novel is set during little more than a day and tells the story of mrs Stevens, a famous poet in her seventies, through short and evocative flashbacks and the encounter and friendship with a boy, Mar, who inhabits the present of the narration.
By page 10 I was completely mesmerised by this novel and its poetic, sparse and yet very deep and evocative style. It felt like the book was written for me on so many occasions:
“it’s monstrous, but nothing seems real to me unless I can say it. This morning, for instance, this walk, all the time I am trying to find a word for that green of the beech leaves. Why not just see them? It’s idiotic!” (page 43).
This and many other examples* in the book felt like the author was telling me things about myself I never realised or were able to put into words myself. Many people say they read to experience lives far and different from their own, I tend to read to find me and see, understand things about myself I didn’t even know where there. This book did this.
The character is drawn into her past and she tells us about the significant people in her life, the persons who created that sparkle in her and indirectly summoned the Muse who opened the dialogues from which her poetry emerged. It’s a fairly short novel so each character that is evoked from Mrs Stevens’ memory is described in just a few pages but it’s as if the author went quickly but surely to the essence of the characters and their relationship with our main character (let’s call her by her first name, Hilary).
The author spends something like 10 pages on Hilary’s husband (she married young in her 20s) and the prose is so exact, so full of wisdom and sentiment (not soppy at all though!! Actually very cerebral) that I was so moved by the end of that part. This I take as a sign of a great book: it spoke to me with just a handful of pages whereas there are novels hundreds of pages long where I have more time to familiarise myself with the characters but I end up being less invested in their story. For example, Hilary’s husband fought in WWI and the way this aspect is introduced into the story has the same immediacy and impact of a strong poetry verse. He was full of life and vitality, would use his body to the point of exhaustion, than pop a pill for the pain that shrapnel wounds left behind and carry on. He and his friends party all the time, drink too much and never look back or talk of the trenches, where each one of them lost almost all the people they had known before the war but the sadness, that infinite darkness was always there, camouflaged.
The relationship with the boy Mar, explored at the very beginning of the book is what sold me. They couldn’t be more different in terms of walks of life but they find each other and help each other. He is a young brooding man, who spends the time he took off from Cambridge sailing in his uncle’s boat, ridden with guild that shouldn’t be there and questioning his homosexuality, despising himself for it. He seeks Hilary’s help and they start a beautiful friendship where each learns from the other, makes mistakes and is ultimately very human and fallible.
Reminiscing about her past is painful for Hilary and it threatens to drag her down a spiral of depression but she is incredibly resilient as she dispels her ghosts and concentrates on the here and now to regain her energies. This really sounds like a good mindfulness technique and I was so positively surprised to read about it here.
The part titled “the interview” continues Hilary’s trip down memory lane but it also introduces a rather lengthy conversation with the interviewers which, apart from discussions of inspiration, the muse and poetic epiphanies, and what it means to be a female writer (questionable ideas about the feminine and masculine, falsely feminist stances and a little too much self-indulgence here), was a big question mark for me. And when I say question mark I mean: “what are they talking about exactly?? This is complete gibberish!” It wasn’t obscurely philosophical or poetic so much as a piece of theatre of the absurd without any intelligible analysis or ideas!
So that was disappointing.
*But I want to finish this review with some of my favourite quotes just to give an example of this book’s compassion and warmth:
“There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always toward chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart” (page 21).
“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting” (page 23).
“Use your bean, start thinking!” “It seems to me I have been doing nothing else!” “Going around in a circle isn’t thinking” (page 34).
September 10, 2021
A short novel that I enjoyed, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was remarkable for its protagonist, Mrs. Stevens, who is a working poet who works hard on her poems. Mrs. Stevens is also in her seventies.
Read
July 7, 2014- There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always toward chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. -
- It was all very well to insist that art was art and had no sex, but the fact was that the days of men were not in the same way fragmented, atomized by indefinite small tasks. There was such a thing as woman's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. -
- On Alice. . . I'm all right, just out of breath. . . no, not possibly . . . , my dear woman, I never go to cocktail parties. Masses of people make me feel ill . . . No doubt I am a lion, but I will not roar at your party! I sound cross? I am cross. What I want is to see you in peace, don't you see? Not to have to get all gigged up and behave myself! -
- I am still sometimes haunted by demons. I want to write poems. I want to feel the pull of the impossible again. . . I want to be myself. -
- I have seen people freeze when they hear I am a writer - that, or they pour out their life story and tell you it is a gift and you can use it for your next novel! -
- Poetry writing, I sometimes think, is nothing but self-censorship. I spend my life disciplining the impulse, when the impulse is there. But I sometimes wonder whether if I had quelled the censor, I might not have done better. Women are afraid of their daemon, want to control it, make it sensible like themselves. -
- I stopped writing novels because I had the wit to see that for me at that time, it was a false start. -
- It was all very well to insist that art was art and had no sex, but the fact was that the days of men were not in the same way fragmented, atomized by indefinite small tasks. There was such a thing as woman's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. -
- On Alice. . . I'm all right, just out of breath. . . no, not possibly . . . , my dear woman, I never go to cocktail parties. Masses of people make me feel ill . . . No doubt I am a lion, but I will not roar at your party! I sound cross? I am cross. What I want is to see you in peace, don't you see? Not to have to get all gigged up and behave myself! -
- I am still sometimes haunted by demons. I want to write poems. I want to feel the pull of the impossible again. . . I want to be myself. -
- I have seen people freeze when they hear I am a writer - that, or they pour out their life story and tell you it is a gift and you can use it for your next novel! -
- Poetry writing, I sometimes think, is nothing but self-censorship. I spend my life disciplining the impulse, when the impulse is there. But I sometimes wonder whether if I had quelled the censor, I might not have done better. Women are afraid of their daemon, want to control it, make it sensible like themselves. -
- I stopped writing novels because I had the wit to see that for me at that time, it was a false start. -
July 27, 2014
This poetic and reflective novel tells of a day in the life of acclaimed poet Hilary Stevens. She is expecting the arrival of two journalists who are coming to interview her, and this allows her to look back over her life, think about her writing and what inspired it, and remember the people she has loved. Now elderly, she has had a long and eventful life and as she talks to the two young people she can reflect also on the writing process itself, about creativity and the especial challenges that face a woman artist, and what it really means to be a writer.
This is a slow and gentle book, and although I didn’t really engage in the reflections on writing, I enjoyed hearing about Mrs Stevens’s life and to discover how important the love of women had been to her. The novel, first published in 1965, is frequently referred to as her “coming out novel” and was eagerly embraced by feminist scholars and the gay community. Sarton herself disliked being considered a “lesbian writer” which she felt narrowed the focus of her work. Certainly it’s art and creativity that seem to be at the heart of this novel rather than her relationships with other women, but for its time it was a bold and thought-provoking book, one which has stood the test of time and still offers much to a contemporary readership.
This is a slow and gentle book, and although I didn’t really engage in the reflections on writing, I enjoyed hearing about Mrs Stevens’s life and to discover how important the love of women had been to her. The novel, first published in 1965, is frequently referred to as her “coming out novel” and was eagerly embraced by feminist scholars and the gay community. Sarton herself disliked being considered a “lesbian writer” which she felt narrowed the focus of her work. Certainly it’s art and creativity that seem to be at the heart of this novel rather than her relationships with other women, but for its time it was a bold and thought-provoking book, one which has stood the test of time and still offers much to a contemporary readership.
September 3, 2015
“‘Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.’”
I really liked this; there is something rich and Woolfian about it, a vague, domestic, lyrical quality that never fails to delight me. The passages focusing exclusively on Hilary Stevens and on her reminiscences of her past lovers were the most powerful and compelling. And her relationship with Mar was also engaging. I did feel like the heart of the book, relaying the afternoon with the interviewers, went on too long and devolved into the tedium of self-important literary criticism. And sometimes the dialogue reads a bit too preciously. But this is a lovely and important novel, particularly for its place as an American novel writing openly about feminism and homosexuality in a positive way, in which no one is crazy, no one’s life is ruined for it.
“In the distance at the end of the road, she could see the house, the blue door caught in the sunlight. Peace and order, she thought. Peace, order, and poetry, to be won over and over again, and never for good, out of the raw, chaotic material. Nothing really mattered now except to get back to her study, to slip a white sheet of paper into the typewriter, to begin again from here.”
I really liked this; there is something rich and Woolfian about it, a vague, domestic, lyrical quality that never fails to delight me. The passages focusing exclusively on Hilary Stevens and on her reminiscences of her past lovers were the most powerful and compelling. And her relationship with Mar was also engaging. I did feel like the heart of the book, relaying the afternoon with the interviewers, went on too long and devolved into the tedium of self-important literary criticism. And sometimes the dialogue reads a bit too preciously. But this is a lovely and important novel, particularly for its place as an American novel writing openly about feminism and homosexuality in a positive way, in which no one is crazy, no one’s life is ruined for it.
“In the distance at the end of the road, she could see the house, the blue door caught in the sunlight. Peace and order, she thought. Peace, order, and poetry, to be won over and over again, and never for good, out of the raw, chaotic material. Nothing really mattered now except to get back to her study, to slip a white sheet of paper into the typewriter, to begin again from here.”
July 25, 2014
Perhaps this is an autobiographical novel of a different sort – there are so many parallels between Hilary Stevens and May Sarton’s life and especially their muse, the source of their inspiration, that this novel is a kind of laying bare one poet’s aesthetic, one poet’s lifelong endeavor to bind love, deeply emotional attachment to another, with the prime spark that lights her art, her poetry.
Thus MRS STEVENS becomes a revelation of one poet’s artistic process – the act of creation – something so rare that I know of few examples – Trauffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, perhaps, or Thomas Hoving’s two interview volumes with Andrew Wyeth.
MRS STEVENS is a rich, true and important novel, disguised in an elderly poet looking back on her life as she prepares for an interview and then the interview itself that is in a large part a source of self discovery for her and a tantalizing series of insights for us.
Thus MRS STEVENS becomes a revelation of one poet’s artistic process – the act of creation – something so rare that I know of few examples – Trauffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, perhaps, or Thomas Hoving’s two interview volumes with Andrew Wyeth.
MRS STEVENS is a rich, true and important novel, disguised in an elderly poet looking back on her life as she prepares for an interview and then the interview itself that is in a large part a source of self discovery for her and a tantalizing series of insights for us.
April 5, 2015
After "The Education of Harriet Hatfield" and "Faithful Are the Wounds", which I both enjoyed, this was a real let-down. There's always a lot of talking in Sarton's books, but this one is ALL talk. The title character, Hilary Stevens, a poet who, at 70, is being rediscovered, first talks to 2 journalists who have come to interview her, then with a young neighbor who is coming to terms with his homosexuality. A lot of these conversations revolve around the nature of poetic inspiration, the role of the Muse, and the difference gender makes to the work and life experience of the writer. Unfortunately, I found Sarton's opinions on all these subjects either obscure or trite, and didn't come away with a single illuminating statement to mull over. Vatic pronouncements like "Women do not thrive in cities" made me squirm. I had come to regard Sarton as a shrewd analyst of the human heart, but feel this particular book is a complete waste of time.
August 18, 2014
While reading, I accidentally referred to this book as Mrs. Sarton Hears the Mermaids Singing more than once. And that's really not an inappropriate title.
This is my third Sarton novel, and I don't know why it took me so long to realize that each of her main characters are poorly disguised versions of herself. A reclusive little old lady writer who is bisexual/a lesbian and has anger issues and loves flowers - that describes both Mrs. Stevens and Ms. Sarton.
Also, nothing much happens in Sarton's novels. The main character thinks about things and has conversations about them and has epiphanies about them, the end.
So, her novels aren't particularly good, I have just realized.
But on an emotional level, I still really love Sarton's work. Maybe just because she was an elderly lesbian, writing her novels in a cottage not far from my hometown, decades before I was born.
This is my third Sarton novel, and I don't know why it took me so long to realize that each of her main characters are poorly disguised versions of herself. A reclusive little old lady writer who is bisexual/a lesbian and has anger issues and loves flowers - that describes both Mrs. Stevens and Ms. Sarton.
Also, nothing much happens in Sarton's novels. The main character thinks about things and has conversations about them and has epiphanies about them, the end.
So, her novels aren't particularly good, I have just realized.
But on an emotional level, I still really love Sarton's work. Maybe just because she was an elderly lesbian, writing her novels in a cottage not far from my hometown, decades before I was born.
June 14, 2015
Written in 1965, when all esteemed women's lit viewed women's love for women as sublime. This book is about a poet being interviewed, which basically gives the author all manner of license to discuss the nature of writing, Muses and inspiration, etc. etc.
It's a literary book for literary people, not my usual thing at all. I thought I'd get it under my belt because it's said to be a signature book of the lesbian/women's studies genre.
Initially I would have said I did NOT like it, and rated it even lower than I did, but it inspired me to write a poem, something I haven't done in years, so I have to credit it an extra star just for that. If a book moves you to do something in the physical world it must be of deep value after all, even as I don't particularly care for it as a matter of taste.
It's a literary book for literary people, not my usual thing at all. I thought I'd get it under my belt because it's said to be a signature book of the lesbian/women's studies genre.
Initially I would have said I did NOT like it, and rated it even lower than I did, but it inspired me to write a poem, something I haven't done in years, so I have to credit it an extra star just for that. If a book moves you to do something in the physical world it must be of deep value after all, even as I don't particularly care for it as a matter of taste.
July 22, 2015
My introduction to May Sarton. A deep and thoughtful look at the life of a woman writer/poet in old age. Also a surprising book for its time (1965) in that the characters speak openly about their sexuality. There is a lot to mine here, especially about the cost of writing, the reality of womanhood, and the way our choices weave our futures for us.
"Woman's work?...Never to categorize, never to separate one thing from another - intellect, the senses, the imagination....some total gathering together where the most realistic and the most mystical can be joined in a celebration of life itself. Woman's work is always toward wholeness."
"Woman's work?...Never to categorize, never to separate one thing from another - intellect, the senses, the imagination....some total gathering together where the most realistic and the most mystical can be joined in a celebration of life itself. Woman's work is always toward wholeness."
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