Virginia Woolf introduced this resonant image to stand for a woman’s economic independence, which she saw as essential to free the woman writer from caring too much about the judgements of others. ‘A room of one’s own’ is, to say the least, a feminist touchstone. It can free us from dependency - which Beauvoir called women’s curse - the intellectual timidity, the self-defeating behavior, the frustration that can result from believing one constantly needs the help of others, particularly of the Man. One feminist reason for valuing solitude, at least as a temporary state, is that it can teach self-sufficiency, self-reliance: in both emotional and practical terms. (She thinks my reverence and gratitude toward Beauvoir are impeding me.) So I try, and realize that this is part of my larger project, too: to see how second-wave feminism took up prefeminist writers (Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy), what they had and maybe still have to teach us, and what we made of them.
I am supposed to be writing about Simone de Beauvoir, but it’s slow going a friend to whom I rage on the phone suggests I might find it simpler to write about Sarton. Instead I was up most of the night in a rage, partly against Sarton, but mostly against whatever it is in some of my friends - and in the state of feminist criticism and feminism generally - that has elevated a minor, self-involved, over-achieving writer with a tin ear and no sense of how to tell a story to the status of a beloved (and beleaguered) heroine. So when I took this book to bed with me, I was expecting a nice, soothing draught of inner peace, lit by a dawning lesbian-feminist consciousness and punctuated by insights I could use to fortify me in any struggles against loneliness, or petty tedium, that might arise. I guess I’d been saving her, and finally the day had come. (There’s a very nice black and white postcard of her, looking dignified but foxy, which lots of people seem to have pinned up by their desks.) I knew many women consider hers an exemplary, a brave, even an enviable life. I’d never read May Sarton, but I’d always looked forward to doing so one day she seems to have a cherished place in the lives of some friends whose judgement I respect.
Here were two books by May Sarton, one called Journal of a Solitude, on sale for a quarter apiece just as I was starting my long-awaited sabbatical, which I had arranged to spend mostly by myself in a small New York apartment.
She concludes that while they satisfy a market demand, they no longer have much to do with feminist politics. Wondering why she felt no urge to join it, Meryl Altman took a closer look at the boom in women’s memoirs. May Sarton has long had a devoted feminist readership. This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 37, Summer 1998.
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