So begins May Sarton's evocative early novel about Violet Gordon's return, after thirty years, to her childhood home, where much had to be settled in one brief summer--fateful decisions about a marriage, a love affair, and a career. No influence was more important than the splendid old Dene's Court itself, and the memories it held.

In this affirmative journal, May Sarton describes both hardships and joys in the daily round of her life in old age--physical struggles counterbalanced by the satisfactions of friendship, nature, critical recognition, and creative spark. Readers both old and new will cherish this latest dispatch from her ongoing journey. Photos.

"I had always imagined a philosophical journal of my seventy-ninth year, dealing with the joys and problems, the doors opening out from old age to unknown efforts and surprises. I looked forward to the year as a potent harvest," May Sarton writes. Assailed by debilitating illnesses, Sarton found herself instead using much of her energy battling for health. Yet, as this record shows, she did after all do what she had wanted to, as she persevered in work, friendships, and love of nature, discovering in the process new landscapes in the country of old age.

The marriage of Ned Fraser, a Boston banker, and Anna Lindstrom, a singer on the brink of fame, is a battlefield of opposing temperaments. Emotional and forthright, Anna battles against Ned's crippling reserve. In this new paperback reissue of the clash of two strong personalities, May Sarton explores the different ways that men and women express both anger and love.

Here she found the peace and aloneness she sought--and partly feared. The journal records the renewing of her life and work in this place.

May Sarton describes living at her eighteenth-century house in Nelson, New Hampshire how she acquired it, how it and the garden became part of her.

In these poems, May Sarton reflects on a journey undertaken to celebrate her fiftieth birthday, a journey that took her around the world to Greece via Japan and India, and finally home to the New Hampshire village where she had put down roots.

"A small, sophisticated, elegantly sentimental journey through a New Hampshire village summer. Our companions are an aging poet, who is sad because he can no longer write he has lost the joy he used to have in simply being alive and a young, mischievous female donkey, who is sad because she can't run and play she has a touch of arthritis. . . . There is a moral, of course, but any moral looks dull next to the simple happiness of the old poet and his long-eared muse." The New Yorker"

The heart of the story is Laura's realization that for her the real connections have been with women: her brilliant and devastating mother, a difficult daughter, and most of all a woman she knew when she was young.

May Sarton's eagerly awaited journals have recorded her life as a single, woman writer and, in later years, as a woman confronting old age. She completed this pilgrimage through her eighty-second year a few months before she died in 1995.