may sarton – she moved alone into an empty new hampshire house and wrote down both the flowers and the rages — the honest record of a life where solitude was the real life.

role

poet and memoirist of chosen solitude

known for

journal of a solitude (1973)

in one line

the hours nobody is watching aren't the empty part of the week. they might be where your real life lives.

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the short version

belgian-born american poet, novelist and diarist, 1912–1995. her family fled belgium in 1914; she grew up near boston, skipped a vassar scholarship for the theatre, and published her first poetry collection in 1937.

in 1958 — her long partnership with judith matlack ended, her father dead — she bought a plain house in nelson, new hampshire, no near neighbors, and built a garden. plant dreaming deep (1968), her memoir of that choice, became beloved — and, she felt, a lie of omission: it made the solitude look 'too radiant.'

so she wrote the correction. journal of a solitude (1973) is one year in the same house with everything left in: the depressions, the rages, the storms of tears — and still the verdict that the alone hours were, in her words, her 'real' life.

her distinction, from the journal: friends, even passionate love, weren't her real life unless there was time alone around them — time to find out what she actually thought. her stated reason for writing at all: 'to find out what i think, to know where i stand.'

she knew the cost of being seen: her 1965 novel mrs. stevens hears the mermaids singing, with an openly lesbian protagonist, was her public coming-out as a writer. her own account, decades later: 'it took courage. i lost two jobs immediately.'

when solitude turned involuntary — a stroke in 1986 that took her ability to write poetry for a time — she kept the same practice, dictating after the stroke: a journal (1988) and journals almost to her death, at 83, of breast cancer, in her house above the sea in maine.

go deeper — their stories on the site

the 'real' life

her first memoir of living alone was so lovely readers wanted to move in. she called it a lie of omission — and spent a year writing the true version: rages, tears, flowers, and the verdict that the alone hours were the life.

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the full story

sarton is on the glass-wall shelf because she ran the experiment this sky keeps wondering about — what happens if you stop treating the alone hours as the failure and start treating them as the life — and published the results without retouching them.

the setup was loss, not theory. by 1958 her thirteen-year partnership with judith matlack had ended and her father was dead; sarton, mid-forties, unpartnered, living entirely off writing and lecturing, bought a plain white house in nelson, new hampshire — no near neighbors — and planted a garden. plant dreaming deep (1968), her memoir of that house, became one of her most loved books, and readers wrote in droves envying the idyll: a woman alone with her flowers and her work. sarton hated what the book had done. by her own account it made the solitude look too radiant — a myth people wanted to move into, with the hard weather edited out.

so she wrote the correction, and the correction is the masterpiece. through 1972–73 she kept a second journal of one year in the same house, deliberately unvarnished, published in 1973 as journal of a solitude. it opens with her return from weeks of travel and visits — 'alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my \'real\' life again at last.' — and immediately explains the strange word choice: friends, even passionate love, were not her real life unless there was time alone around them, time to explore and discover what had actually happened. the claim is the island's quietest heresy: company wasn't the real life interrupted by solitude. solitude was the real life, interrupted — pleasantly, but interrupted — by company.

and she kept the storms in, which is why the book still gets handed from one solitary person to another. 'i was attacked by a storm of tears,' she writes — tears she traces to frustration and buried anger, not sadness; elsewhere she writes of wanting to break through to the rough rocky depths where the unresolved violence lived. a working writer in her sixties, depressed at intervals, furious at intervals, and still choosing the house — because leaving it meant losing access to herself. the writing itself was the access: 'to find out what i think, to know where i stand.' the journal's honesty about the cost is exactly what makes its verdict trustworthy.

she had paid for visibility before she chose it daily. in 1965 she published mrs. stevens hears the mermaids singing — one of the first american novels to give a lesbian protagonist a full, undegraded inner life — her coming-out as a writer, at real price. her own account, in a 1992 interview: 'it took courage. i lost two jobs immediately.' and when the solitude finally turned involuntary — a 1986 stroke that for a time took the poetry — she aimed the same instrument at it, dictating after the stroke: a journal (1988) and further journals nearly to the end. she died in 1995, at 83, of breast cancer, at her house above the sea in york, maine. honest notes: her depressions and rages are her own literary self-portrait, not a clinical record, and are presented as her account; the famous poverty-of-self line about loneliness and solitude is attributed to her everywhere but pinned to no page, so it is described on this site, never printed; and the two lost jobs are her own retrospective telling, kept as such.