The author chronicles her efforts to regain her health after having suffered a stroke at the age of seventy-three, describes her self-proclaimed life of solitude, and offers keen observations on the natural world surrounding her.

"May Sarton has become one of America's best-loved writers. . . The publication of the first collection of primarily new verse in a decade will bring joy to her admirers. . . The more recent work is exquisitely tender, full of reverence for the most fleeting of beauties".

This is the story of two poets, one an elderly Belgian woman known to the world as Jean Latour, the other a young Englishman. When Mark Taylor finds his life and art broken up by his love for an older, married woman, he turns for help to the poems of Jean Latour and finds the help he craves in the poet herself. In this early work we see the first flowering of May Sarton's special ability to depict sensitive people who find they must travel new pathways if they are to discover their true selves.

In this book, we are closer to the marrow than ever before in May Sarton's writing.

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.

When Harriet Hatfield opens a bookstore for women in a blue-collar neighborhood near Boston, she is bombarded by anonymous threats. And when the Boston Globe reports "Lesbian Bookstore Owner Threatened," her education in the narrow-mindedness of her fellow man--and woman--begins.

May Sarton's Willard is a small town in the rocky hills of New Hampshire, a place that attracts "the untameable, the wild, the gentle." As Sarton takes us into the lives of the people who live there, we encounter a rich tapestry of characters and relationships. In the center are the deep, prickly friendship between Christina, an old Bostonian, and Ellen, the daughter of a farmer, and the unfolding process by which Christina and her husband "come into their own" in their marriage and become winter people at last

Reed and Poppy Whitelaw's conventional and apparently serene life together is shattered when Poppy tells Reed that she has decided to leave him. In a series of encounters that follow the shock of this news, which affects not only Reed but also their children and friends--in particular Philip, who must learn why he is so invested in their marriage--Reed and Poppy struggle to make sense of their lives in this alien new terrain.

Sarton's memoir begins with her roots in a Belgian childhood anddescribes her youth and education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hercoming-of-age years, and the people who influenced her life as a writer.

The "magnificent spinster" is Jane Reid, a teacher who became not only a revered role model but a dear friend to Cam, the narrator of this novel within a novel. After Jane's death, the accidental discovery of poems written by Cam in her youth to Jane prompts a flood of recollections--and frees Cam to imagine in fiction Jane's passionately vibrant life.