May Sarton was one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century. Her love affairs with women were equally abundant. Although passion spurred her creativity, she lamented her "excess of love" and her "longing to give the same thing to too many people."Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium. When she was two years old, her family fled to England after the Germans invaded Belgium; by 1916, the family had moved to America and settled in Cambridge, Mass. Sarton attended Shady Hill, one of the country’s first alternative schools, where she developed a crush on the principal, Katharine Taylor.

Sarton soon found a new idol in lesbian actress Eva Le Gallienne, and gave up a scholarship to Vassar to join her Civic Repertory Theater in New York City. After Sarton’s own theater venture collapsed during the Depression, she decided to devote herself to writing. Her work was first published in Poetry magazine in 1930.

Maintaining an attachment to her European roots, Sarton traveled frequently to Brussels, Paris, and London, where she became acquainted with many of the era’s literary lights. Often in desperate financial straits, she relied on support from her father to supplement her meager earnings from writing, teaching, and lecturing.

In 1936 she began an affair with British scientist Julian Huxley—who was close to her father’s age—but she resented his sexual demands. Soon thereafter, she developed a passionate attachment to Huxley’s wife, Juliette. Although Juliette at first spurned her overtures, Sarton’s feelings never waned.

Sarton had numerous romantic and sexual relationships, often with heterosexually identified women much older than herself. Her lovers were the chief inspiration for her poetry: "I loved them in the way that one loves at any age...Obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict...I wrote poems to and about them. I put them into novels...I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals."

Sarton shared a home with just one companion in her life, Judith Matlack, a Simmons College professor 14 years her senior whom she met in 1945. Matlack was not enthusiastic about sex and their relationship lacked passion. "I could never feel for a woman what I would feel with a man physically," she warned Sarton early on. Nevertheless, Sarton considered them "truly married for fifteen years"; they lived together in Matlack’s Cambridge home and remained close even after Sarton moved away.

While she claimed to desire continuity and permanence, Sarton was unable to resist taking new lovers. In 1948, she again visited Paris, where she finally consummated her relationship with Juliette Huxley. When Sarton threatened to reveal the affair to Julian, Juliette ended it. During a subsequent trip, she had a fling with a close friend of her mother in Switzerland. In 1955, Sarton began a tempestuous multi-year liaison with Harvard anthropologist Cora Dubois. "It was a passionate relationship," Sarton later recalled, "but we fought like tigers, poetry against science."

At age 53, Sarton came out as a lesbian with the publication of her novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. In it, a famous elderly lesbian poet—modeled after Sarton—tells two interviewers about her past relationships and her life as an independent woman artist. The book was ahead of its time, and Sarton lost friendships and employment opportunities due to its frankness.

But Sarton’s best-known memoir, Journal of a Solitude (1973), garnered widespread praise. Although Sarton never received the critical acclaim she desired for her poetry, her journals and novels were embraced by feminists and lesbians—becoming a mainstay of women’s studies courses—and eventually brought her prosperity.

In 1958, Sarton moved to the small town of Nelson, N.H., where she devoted herself to her garden and her many pets. Although she sang the praises of solitude, she often surrounded herself with a myriad of friends and lovers, and found time to read hundreds of fan letters. In 1971, she relocated to a rented house on the Maine coast, where she spent her remaining years.

Sarton continued to fall in love with new women and also rekindled an old flame. After Julian Huxley died in 1975, she and Juliette resumed a devoted friendship, which continued until the latter’s death in 1994. "I have had many lovers, many friends," Sarton said, "but none has so nourished the poet and the lover as she did."

Although she grew increasingly frail, Sarton continued to produce new work and read her poetry before standing-room- only audiences when she was in her 70s and 80s. Her 1989 novel, The Education of Harriet Hatfield, tells the tale of a 60-year-old woman who faces homophobic violence when she opens a woman’s bookstore near Boston. Sarton’s later journals recount her recovery from breast cancer and a temporarily disabling stroke, which left her unable to write or type and forced her to dictate her final books. Sarton’s last journal, At Eighty-two, was completed just months before her death from cancer in July 1995.