May Sarton

May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton , an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium . Her parents were science historian George Sarton and his wife, the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. When German troops invaded Belgium after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, her family fled to Ipswich, England where Sarton's maternal grandmother lived. One year later, they moved to Boston, Massachusetts. She went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, graduating from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. She started theatre... lessons in her late teens, but continued writing poetry, eventually publishing her first collection in 1937 entitled Encounter in April. In 1945 she met her partner for the next thirteen years, Judy Matlack, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They separated in 1956, when Sarton's father died and Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire. Honey in the Hive is about their relationship. In her memoir At Seventy, she reflected on Judy's importance in her life and how her Unitarian Universalist upbringing shaped her.
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